In this lesson, we're going to be going over how to flatten your designs for 3d printing. Notice here we've got the highlighted polygons. And that's just saying that these are going to be an issue when going to 3d print. And we'll need support material to be able to 3d print these layers here. So let me show you a trick that I do to flatten out the base of this monkey so that it can easily 3d print without supports. So let's switch on back to object mode.

To add a new object we're going to hit, we're going to create a new cube by hitting shift a and select cube. Notice that if we go to View, our cube is very, very tiny. So let's increase that maybe by maybe 200 on each side, and now we've got a huge box, let's hit period on the numpad to scale that in and we can hit G to grab it and Z to bring it on down. So this will act kind of like our printing bed. To just click once you've got it, kind of near the bottom of Suzanne's head here. And now, what we're going to do is go and press three on the numpad.

That will let us see the right side and select on Suzanne's head here, hit R to rotate. And now we're just going to slightly rotate this until it's sitting kind of more at a, almost as at the head was sitting on a tabletop. So just kind of guesstimating here, and that looks about right. And what we're trying to do is use this box to cut off a bottom piece of the the print here so that it can easily be 3d printed at the very beginning kind of giving it a good foundation. So let's click on the box, hit G and hit z to bring it up ever so slightly, and we just want to barely touch the bottom of the skull here and this is a good time to use the orthographic perspective because if you notice if we're in perspective mode, it's kind of hard to tell.

We'd have to like really move our guy around. And kind of hope that that looks pretty, right. But if I hit five on my numpad and go to orthographic mode, we can really see this from the side perspective here. So let's just zoom in here. And I'm also going to turn Suzanne's head, let's just rotate it just a little bit more, I'm trying to make her chin, even with her ear. That way, we can chop off a little bit of the bottom of the ear as well.

Let's do something more like that where she's looking. She's looking a little bit more up. And so now let's grab the cube and hit g z, and that will slide it up on the z axis. And what we're going to do is just barely run into the bottom of that ear there. So right there, maybe zoom in so you can see. So that way we can kind of cut off just the base, and that'll give the printer a really good foundation, when it's going to 3d print this without support So to chop off the bottom, make sure you're still in object mode, go to Suzanne.

And in the modifiers tab, we're going to add a Boolean, but this time, we're going to leave it at the default which is difference, which is means we're going to subtract this box shape from Suzanne the monkey face. So to do that, let's click on the eyedropper and select the cube and nothing has happened. But it has. So what happened is we can't see the slice because the cube is still in the way. So just turn that eyeball off on your cube, rotate it around and Looky there, we've got a nice flat bottom to 3d print this design without supports. Another cool tip you can do is leave your cube on.

And once if you have your cube selected, go into the object tab. twiddle down the viewport display. And at the bottom there is a drop down, you can display as wire. And this gives you kind of a live feed of the cut. So we still have the cube selected, let's hit G, and then z to lock it. And you can see kind of, as you know, figure out that sweet spot of where you want to really take the bottom and flatten it out.

I do this all the time just to give it a really flat base and make it really easy for yourself and other people to 3d print your boss. So I'm going to do something maybe right about there. And check it out. We've got a nice flat bottom, even on the ear. And that's how we're getting around having to 3d print the ears floating in space or the back of the head here. We're just gonna flatten it out as if it's sitting on a desktop and I think that's going to be really adorable.

So I'm happy with that. Let's go ahead and apply the modifier so Make sure you're on Suzanne and hit Apply. Go ahead and delete your cube don't need that anymore. Just right click and click on Delete. Now we have a 3d printable file I think let's check it in the 3d print toolbox and in the next video we're going to show you how to export this and we can actually 3d print it