Hey, what is up, nation?
In this session I'm gonna be teaching you how you can
generate support so for your 3D prints. If you stick around to the end, I'll
teach you some advanced techniques that you can use in mesh mixer to make some
really cool 3D prints.
All right, so we're going to be using today is a software called "mesh mixer". So
if you go to meshmixer.com, you can come down, there's on here on the left
side. Depending on when you're doing this. And and if they've redesigned their
website, there's a little button up here, and there's a button here. Just click
that and then you can pick the Installer that you want. So it's super easy. And
then you just want to go and open up mesh mixer. Okay, so when you open mesh
mixer, you can import. You want to import an STL file. If you're working in
Sketchup, you can get an STL export plug-in. Just search the extension
warehouse for STL, and you should be able to find one. An STL exporter. And then you
should be able to import that. I'm gonna import this bunny. Just to show you guys
what we're doing here. So you can see, I have a bunny on a 3D print bed. I
actually have the dremel 3D ideal builder. Sorry :) But if you want to change
that, if you you can look for the manufacture, and choose a model. And it'll
change the printbed. It's not that big of a deal. You don't actually need it. But it
helps if you're trying to visualize what your object is gonna be like when you
print it. So there's that. Now I'm gonna break this down in two parts. The first
part is just gonna be how to generate supports, and the second part I'm gonna
show you a little bit more about mesh mixer and what you can do in it. So the
first part, you just want to do if you just want to generate supports. You want
to come down to analysis on the left side, and you want to choose overhangs.
And now it's gonna do an analysis on your model. And it's going to come with
some red areas. And these are the areas that it's saying, maybe you should
consider putting some supports here. So there are presets here. Depending on
of 3D printer that you have. So like...like I said. I have the dremel 3D idea builder,
so I would just select that. And then there's a ton of different options in
here that you can mess around with. This preset is like a good starting point. But
you may decide later on that you like different settings. Or slightly different
settings. So you can change the...a bunch of this stuff. I'm not going to go
in-depth on any of that. We're just gonna manually, sort of fix the stuff that...that
this does. That mesh mixture creates. So I'm gonna minimize this so you can see
this window. And then there's this little button here. This is generate support. You
just click that. And it will run through some processes. And it'll generate these
crazy-looking supports. And then I...all you have to do from here, is go to export.
And you can export an STL file. That will have your support. So that's pretty
simple. What you can do in mesh mixer, is if you shift click on any of these
little points, it'll delete them. And you can drag and click on areas to generate
your own supports. That's kind of cool. You can also shift click on an area. And
it'll auto...it'll take like that point that you selected. And they'll connect it
somewhere. That's all pretty useful stuff. Cuz a lot of times you'll see stuff that
like doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. There's a lot of guys here that
are like next to each other. You know, like I don't know if this is gonna work
out that well. And maybe you printed. And there's like these little nubs all over,
and you want to...you want to fix it. So, that's just pretty helpful when you're...
when you're going to do this. And this like whole thing here is just bizarre to
me. But maybe we would print fine. Yeah, so this this is like really useful because
it gives you supports. But then these things just sort of snap off. Hopefully,
they snap off. When you go, when your print is finished. So,
yeah. I'm a huge fan of the sports here. Used them all the time.
It seems like meshmixer 3.5 is doing well. For some reason previous
version of mesh mixer, I couldn't even open it. It would just crash every
single time. So it looks like 3.5 has fixed that. At least. So, pretty cool. And I
think you can actually even print from here, which is also cool. So we're just
gonna remove these supports here, and I'm gonna show you some cool stuff that you
can actually do with mesh mixer. So this bunny is actually hollow. But there's, if
you remember that picture that we saw. If we go back to this, this like cool-looking
bunny. I'm gonna make something like that. So you can actually use the select tool.
You get a brush. This is sort of like a sculpting tool. So we're gonna start here
the bunny's head. We're just gonna select down here, around. And then bring this
across to the front. So we're just kind of like...so to do a spiral around the
this guy.
So now we have that guy. And then all we have to do is delete. Hit the Delete key
there and that's all! It's really jagged. So you can actually sculpt. There's a
brush here called "bubble smooth". So if I...the strength is okay. I just want the
size to be a little bit bigger. Then actually just smooth the sky...so we're
just gonna go around. We're gonna smooth this edge. Like I said. You can see that
the inside is hollow for this. But this is just like really cleaning up all that
stuff. There's something like really satisfying about it too, I don't know
what it is :) Just like painting over and it does what you wanted to. Okay, so that
looks pretty good. I probably should have selected things a little bit differently
like this little. It's still do it. This little guy is weird to me. So we're just
gonna change this size down.
Just selected the Polly's here, I guess. So delete. And now let's go back to our
sculpt. Just move this out. Okay, it looks pretty good.
Okay, so we have this guy. But it's just like one face. So what we can do, is you
can actually select everything. So I just hit control+A there. Just select
everything. Then we can go to edit -> extrude. You can see it's like kind of
weird what it's doing. We want to choose Direction "normals". Or "normal". And then we
can just change the offset. You need to go to the inside.
Or go to the outside. And had a thickness. So let's say, we like the way that that
looks. Except, you know. And then maybe you want to come back the ear looks like
it's doing some weird stuff. So maybe you just want to fix that up a little bit.
Just smooth that out. But you have this really cool Bunny. And then you just go.
Since this is what obviously be hard to 3D print. You just go to overhangs. And
you generate your 3D supports. And this will obviously take a lot longer. Because
there's a lot more points that it needs to generate. But, it doesn't automatically,
which is really cool. So, hopefully this video helped. If you guys liked it, please
don't forget to like, subscribe and share this video with your friends. And as
always, happy hacking.
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