After experimenting with U-Design over the last week, I thought it would be good to share some of my experiences. I wrote a short tutorial called 'Things to Keep in Mind When Designing for 3D Printing' that should help you avoid some of the most common problems that people seem to have. Please leave any comments and crits below this announcement and I'll incorporate them. Cheers, Bart
Hey Bart, Nice tutorial! I have a bit of comment though. If you want to 3D print for instance the 3D cube puzzle there are several options. 1. you can print all the puzzle pieces seperately. 2. you can combine the pieces into one file to be printed 2.1 Keep in mind that the height of the model is the bottle neck when it comes to printing speed. So it's important to keep the combined model as low as possible. 2.2. Not only is the model in the picture very high there is also a lot of "air" between the seperate pieces. All this voight has to be filled with so called support material. This again affects printing speed and material consumption. Conclusion: It is a very good idea to combine different pieces of one model to one 3D printable file. But when doing this always keep in mind that the combined file is as low as possible (don't stack pieces but put them side by side). always try to make the bottom wider than the top to avoid voights.
Hi Rob, thanks for the feedback! Right now I did have all pieces combines into one file (into one object even, as U-Design requires that at the moment). I did not know about placing all pieces flat on the floor and tightly packed though - I'll cover that in another tutorial. Cheers, Bart