<aside> 🚧 More info coming soon! We’ll be building out this page with more information about common issues we see with model files for printing.
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Below are some considerations to keep in mind when preparing files for 3D printing:
Slicer programs expect fully-closed solid objects as the input geometry for them to process.
Surface modeling programs like Rhino allow you to make non-physical, non-manifold geometry, which can be confusing to the slicer programs.
Ideally you want the geometry you’re outputting from Rhino to be a closed polysurface or closed mesh.
Under certain circumstances, creating a model at full 1:1 scale (let’s say a site with buildings that could be hundreds or thousands of feet) and then scaling it down in Rhino to print a few inches in length will cause problems.
The most general fix for this would be exporting the model at full 1:1 scale in its native units, and then do the appropriate scaling in the slicer program.
Most slicer programs accept an input file type called STL (an abbreviation for stereolithography, which was basically the first type of 3D printing).
STL files are inherently a mesh (a triangulated one) - this implies that any time you need to print something with curvature, they are an approximation of the true shape you’ve modeled and there are a few things to pay attention to as a result.
STL files are inherently unitless - they are output in whatever unit system you’re working with (feet, inches, meters…) but don’t carry that information with them. Think of it this way: if you ask how big something is and I say “10”, it’s not clear if I’m saying it’s 10 feet or 10 inches. The STL file is like that. So that means you need to know what units your model was made in to get the scale right.
Many slicer programs are expecting that STL files were created in units of millimeters (Cura, Preform, Bambu Studio).