3D Printing from SketchUp _ SketchUp Show #68 (Tutorial).

In this episode of the SketchUp show, we're going to design a 3D printable gift. It's the holidays, and I've decided to design a chess piece with a typographic twist from inspiration I found online. So, in this tutorial, I'll design a chess piece, make it a 3D printable solid, and export it in a printable format. I'll also be test driving this 3D mouse to see if it makes me more efficient. As usual, if we cover anything you are unfamiliar with in SketchUp, you can ask questions in the comments below, or browse our entire library of video tutorials on our website. But for now, let's get started with this tutorial. When 3D printing from SketchUp, the first step is to choose your printer. The printer and the material that it uses will dictate what you're able to do in SketchUp. Now, you'll most likely be choosing between a desktop printer, a local shop, or an online service. For this tutorial, I'm going to use an online service called Shapeways, and I'll be using the strong and flexible plastic material. So, let's open SketchUp and get started. I'm creating a chess piece, so I'll start by creating a simple base. I'm going to make it a one-inch diameter. And what I'm creating is the footprint for my base, and now I also want to create the profile. The base will be two and a half inches tall. And I'll want to use the pencil tool and the arc tool to create an interesting profile, and then I'll erase away the excess geometry that I don't need. Now, I can use the follow me tool to make this a solid, and it will print just fine. But I also know that if I make it hollow on the inside, it'll be much cheaper to 3D print, so let's take a look at how to do that. So, I want to give the outside surface of this base a little bit of thickness. So, I'll use the offset tool to offset these edges by a millimeter, and then I'll erase away the extra bits of the profile I don't need, and take the follow me tool and spin that profile around. And I want to turn these faces right side out, and then I'll come around to the bottom here and use the pencil tool to heal this bottom edge. Erase away the surface I don't need, and we can see here that the inside of this shape is hollow, and then I'll want to select it all and make it a group. And the goal here is to make sure that we have a solid, so the easiest way to check that is through the entity info window, and we'll see there at the top that we have a solid group. So, this is a really important concept when you're 3D printing from SketchUp. Your geometry must be a solid, so in order to do that, you group it all up, and then to see if SketchUp thinks it's a solid, you use the entity info window, and you'll see that solid group, or you can also make it a component, and it would say solid component. So, with that step done, let's create the top to our chess piece. So, we can close down the entity info window, and this is going to be the king, and I'll So, we'll use the 3D text tool. We'll choose our font, and we'll also choose the height here, and then I want to make sure that this is extruded with that same millimeter thickness. Place it down here, and we will rotate it up into the vertical position. Then, I will make a copy, and we'll flip that copy along in the blue direction, sort of mirroring it about the other, and then we'll come inside of the component and offset by that millimeter again, and then we'll take the push-pull tool and push-pull that same thickness that we did earlier. Close that out, and move that copy next to each other to create a hollow inside to our K. Now, that was a pretty quick way to create a hollow K. In order to get it to 3D print hollow, we're going to need to create an escape hole. Now, with the base, we already have an escape hole in the bottom. With the K, we'll have to cut one in ourselves, so let's take a look at how to do that. Let's over to the bottom here of the K so we can cut this escape hole, and we'll come inside this first component, use the offset tool, create that same one millimeter thickness, and then take the push-pull, push-pull away, close that component. Now, we can double-check that first component, says it's a solid component in the Entity Info. That second component says it's a solid component. Good to go there. We'll select them both, and then right-click and use the option from the solids tools in SketchUp for outer shell. That'll join those two up, and if we check the Entity Info, it's now a solid group, all one hollow 3D printable model. Okay, so now the K is a 3D printable hollow model, and so is the base, but we want to put them together into one object so we can print that final chess piece. So, let's add the K to the top of the base. So, the first thing we'll do is we'll grab this K with the move tool and bring it up to the top of the base. Then, we'll take a few moments to place it somewhere near the middle there of the object. Now, next, we'll hide the base, and we're going to need to make sure that this escape hole from the K actually cuts through to the base. So, copy the line work, close this group, unhide the bottom base, hide the K, paste the line work in place, and then push-pull that through to the bottom face there to cut it through. Close the group, unhide the K, and now we've got an escape hole that will be viewable all the way through from the bottom of the chess piece. So, then we orbit back around to the top here and check the Entity Info window, and we'll see that for both the base and the K, we still have that solid group. And then, the last thing we'll want to do is select both and use the outer shell command again to turn them into one big solid group. And now, this is ready to be 3D printed as a nice hollow solid group. The last thing we're going to need to do is just make sure to export it in a friendly format. So, I need to export this as an STL file, and if you don't already have it, there's an extension on the Extension Warehouse called SketchUp STL that allows you to do this. I already have this extension installed, so I'll go to the File menu, Export STL, and as far as units, I'm using an inches template, and for the file format, I'll select Binary to keep my file size low, and then hit OK, and then save it to a spot on the desktop. We'll call it King, and save my file. Now that you know what it takes to 3D print from SketchUp, I'd love to hear what you're thinking of printing. Share your ideas in the comments below. That's it for this episode. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time. Go ahead and start a new file. We'll start this example with the Rectangle tool. If you type in a distance here, the distance is going to be the overall distance between the center of the first copy and the center of the last copy. Welcome to the SketchUp Pro Series for working with CAD. Click on the texture that's in there, and it'll replace it with the new one in the library. Load that with the fridge that I downloaded to the desktop. You get a really detailed component that you can edit really quickly. Go to Refrigerator and get a leader text for that. Now when the scene is finished, before you hold off and start making changes, you have a couple of options.