So a couple of months ago my boss bought the company a 3d printer for rapid prototyping. Fortunately we don't use this printer 24/7, so I asked my boss if I could take a crack at 3d printing. He enthusiastically agreed, and I started to plan my 3d printing projects.
So I asked some people in our Aideron Slack what I should print. Resoundingly the response was "Eve ships!" So armed with a laptop, Slic3r, Sketchup Maker, Blender, and the determination only afforded to space ship captains, I departed on a journey into 3d printing. Before I begin, I have to give a shout out to FATTOX4189 of www.thingiverse.com who has done most of the hard work for me and already exported the models from EVE and did a lot of the initial clean up work. These models are of Excellent quality, and stand up pretty well to printing, and cut up pretty easy in Slic3r with a few exceptions.
So a few notes about the process of 3d printing for those who are not familiar with the technology. first of all, 3d models in the form of .stl or .obj files are exported from your favorite 3d editing software (like Blender or Sketchup). These files are then imported into a software desgined to generate the G-code to send to a printer. Gcode is an industry standard code for any 3d design or manufacturing equipment like CNC mills or lathes. After that you take that Gcode to a 3d printer. There are several technologies for this, but our printer is an extrusion deposition printer which means it works like an inkjet except it uses plastic and not ink. For the sake of simplicity, when I talk about printing i'm only going to talk about extrusion deposition printers, since these are the only kind I have experience with.
Part of why I wanted to undertake this project is that I want to push this 3d printing technology into a different direction than we're doing at work. At work this printer is being used to make large models to attach to jeeps to pre-fit bits to each other before we make them in steel and aluminum. I wanted to see how well this thing applies to a level of detail that we simply don't do normally at work.
So the first ship I decided to try was the federation navy comet. After a lot of figuring out 'what the hell am I doing here' and learning a few very important lessons about how to even turn the printer on and get it to temperature I discovered that the best thing to do is find a symmetry point on the ship and split it there. then you can take that model and print it. This was the result.
Looks pretty good right?!
Awwwh shit. Apparently the printer doesn't do good with those thin little winglets. In fact the other winglet broke off this model later. I haven't gotten a chance to re-approach this ship yet, but I have learned a few things from when I printed Rainbow Dash about small printing small winglets that I want to try.
As you can see, I chose to do a vertical split on rainbow, and the wings wound up being extruded slowly but with much more substance to them. There are a few errors on her, but nothing the sword of EXACT-Zero won't fix.
Rotating the models comes with its own risks though. I've tried to rotate a few of the models and the results have been rather mixed. I'll show you why when I detail the Vexor project in another blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment