In this lesson, we're going to be going over the 3d printing toolbox add on. So let's get started by reducing this view from four to one. So to do that, let's collapse these, I'm just going to click in this bottom corner and click and slide down, and it will collapse this one. I'll do the same thing here the other way, just clicking the corner slide up. And from here, click in the middle here and go to the right. And now we have one view.

Let's bring back our tools with the Tiki and the in for information on the information pop out there should be a 3d printing tab. So for the tool box, what you get you get some statistics so you can get the volume or the area of this. How much plastic would it take? How much plastic are we talking for the volume so you get a measurement down here. So that'll help when you're trying to get some online quotes for maybe a 3d printing manufacturer that will give you some some measurements. Next you have checks so these are the ones we're going to be using the most And that is your solid.

So notice when I click to solid, we get some information out down here. And it's saying that there are 42 non manifold edges. And what that means is we got some holes in here. So click on that button, and Blender will highlight the edges that are in question. So it's kind of hard to see. So let me show you a trick.

If you hit Shift h that will hide anything that's not selected. It looks like we have some holes, maybe in the skull, maybe in the eyeball. So thank you blender, 3d printing toolkit, now we know. So let's just bring everything back. And to do that you can do alt H and that will unhide everything. And next we have intersections.

So go ahead and click on intersections, and now holy rejoices we've got 57 intersecting faces. So let's click that. And there they are. They are intersecting somehow. So you can kind of See it down here that's poking out. There's like an eyeball poking out here.

If I hit Shift H, now we can really see, okay, yep, we've got some definite collision and intersecting of polygons, and that means some of these are gonna have to get lost, and we're gonna have to make it more one. And that is the second problem with this Susanne model for 3d printing. So let's bring everything back with alt H. And next we have to generate this is looking for deformed geometry on your model. So let's go ahead and click on that. And we have zero so there are no zero faces and there are no zero edges. So I don't see this one too often.

Next, we have distorted so let's click on distorted and notice we have 20 non flat or distorted faces click on that button. There they are. So that is Blender 3d print toolbox telling us what is happening. So these are just squares or faces that have just been pushed beyond their means. See, no, this one's getting really bent in turn right there, this is getting turned. So this one, you know, he's stretched pretty far away out here.

So we're going to show you how to fix these with just a simple click of a button, and just a moment. Next check we have thickness. So if we click on thickness, and notice down here we have two thin faces. So this is also known as wall thickness. So it's just saying that this is this little point right here, off. Again, if you hit Shift H, it's, that's it, it's just this little piece of eye and we can alt h to bring it back, highlight our issues.

And sometimes scaling your model up we'll fix this. Sometimes you may have to redesign or, you know, just make the hallways or pathways a little thicker. Next is edge sharp, and that is similar to thickness or wall thickness, but it's really talking about sharpness of like an edge. Like a sharpened of a blade or a knife, or the front of a boat, you know that blade. If it's too sharp and pointy, real world, 3d printers may have a problem 3d printing it, so it may need to be a little less sharp. So let's go ahead and Ctrl A to D Select All, and the final check is overhang.

So if I click on overhang notice we have 58 overhanging faces. And that just means the 3d printer would need support material to build these steep inclines. Right? So you could either fix these manually or stay tuned for the next few lessons where I'll teach you how to 3d print this without supports. So let's go ahead and Ctrl A to D select all and notice down here we've got a big button that says check it all. So that will check all of these all at once and this is what I usually do, check all and now you get non manifold you know intersecting faces your default faces and your thin faces and your overhanging all at one click of a button.

So next we have the cleanup crew. And let's go ahead and select all with a. And let's and this will isolate any edges or points that are just floating out kind of off by themselves just not really a part of the main mesh. So that will get rid of a lot of those. Another trick you can do is mesh cleanup, remove doubles that will usually help clean up a lot of those stragglers or some that are just kind of in the wrong spot. And next is the distorted but we've already seen distorted before, but this one is the fixer upper.

He's the cleanup crew. So we'll let's bring up our distorted and as our non flat faces here, and then click on our cleanup distorted and watch these triangles here. Boom, it will make a little make a little bit more sense to a 3d printer. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it helps. That one looks pretty good.

So we'll keep it and the next button we have is make manifold This is like the magic But make manifold, it's like hey, just just fix it blender, it does work really well for simple designs. But if you're trying more complex designs, sometimes it doesn't give you the results that you want. So go ahead and try it if you want, but I'm going to try and teach you how to not rely on that button and actually fix the designs. Next, we have the scale twos, you can scale this to as large as your 3d printer. So you could type in the volume or the the bounds, which is just like the size of your 3d printing bed. So if I click on bounds, let's add 300, which is the size of my print bed, and hit OK. And notice we destroyed their face.

Let's undo that. And that's because we have to select all with a and now we can scale to the bounds of 300 millimeters. Okay, and now you can see it just popped up. And it's huge. It is ginormous. I'm gonna undo that.

And so next you have your export path that you'll use this a bunch. So the export path you can use the same scale or, you know, export textures with it, we're not going to use that today, we're just going to click on the folder, tell Blender which folder we want these to go into hit accept, choose the format, and hit export. And that will send your design over to your location of choice. It'll also tell you the output which is what it actually named the 3d print file. So in the next video, we're going to show you how to actually fix this file and get it ready for 3d printing.