3D Printing a City - Easiest Method - No Blender!

hey guys welcome to the tutorial today I'm going to be showing you guys how to 3D print any City for software you only need SketchUp and your favorite 3D printing slicer no blender needed I'm making this video because when I started this project I didn't have any visual resources explaining how to do topology buildings extruding roads and cutting the print up into several sections this video will cover all of that shout out to imploding coding super great guide I found on Reddit also shout out to hybrid riken who commented on that guide and figured out that there was no need for the use of blender okay so the first step is going to be going into cadmapper tocom to obtain the file of the city you want I'm going to use Boston as an example you can do this for free if the selected area is under 1 km squared otherwise the price ranges for my section of Boston it was $14 make sure you select 3D buildings set false height and topography I suggest 5 m for the false height set Road geometry to mesh surfaces and then the following numbers below next you want to start a 7-Day free trial of SketchUp Pro after you make an account you'll be able to download the software when finish go ahead and open that cadmapper file that you downloaded from earlier it's a large file so that when you move it around certain features might disappear but they'll render back after a few moments of being still go to extensions extension Warehouse search for enoth terrain volume and then install it in the extension manager make sure that it's enabled click on any topology service region and then click on the terrain volume extension this will give the terrain any arbitrary height if you select the topology then go to edit solid group explode you'll be able to select the bottom surface then using the SketchUp extrude tool you'll be able to thicken the base now scale the model model down so it's the size you want I want mine to be 2T x 2 ft so I'm going to scale down my model to 610 mm by 610 mm we can also change the cut segments off in a slicer so you don't have to worry about making it perfect right now I'm going to increase the minimum topology height to 3 mm just so the pieces stay rigid next we have to install the Fredo 6 plug-in library from sketchucation you can make a free account and then download the file additionally you'll have to download the Fredo 6 joint Push Pull plugin going back to SketchUp now you'll open the extension manager and then add these two files make sure they're enabled now we have to open the SketchUp file tags which are essentially like layers we're going to change the visibility so that we can only see the layers we want to extrude keep keep on paths minor roads major roads and highways you shouldn't be able to see the topology anymore now select all and then raise it up half a mm if you turn the topology on again you should be able to see that everything is slightly hovering over it now you might want to explode the sections Before The Next Step if you end up having issues with everything selected except the topology click tools Fredo 6 collection then extrude push pull click a point and drag your cursor down in the offset box type in at least half millimet down press okay there might be a lot of lag and you might have to try a few times if your computer is slow after the command has been registered it'll show you what percentage has been done for the city of Montreal it took me about 1 hour for this process to be completed this one for Boston took about 2 hours to complete when this is done you can go back into to tags and make the buildings and topology visible again then go ahead and Export the file as an STL in a slicing software like bamboo Labs we're going to be dividing the STL file into nine equal parts first import the file and make sure the dimensions stay the same press the cut tool and change the plane orientation by entering 90° I'm going to trim the outside of the map so that it's cleaner make sure you click cut to Parts otherwise the part might be moved around repeat the process to cut all the other sides now to remove these Cuts go to objects click on the objects you want to remove and then press delete leave just the main piece using the scale tool make the piece close to the desired Dimensions at this point save the STL by right clicking the object and then clicking save now the part should be Centered for the next step if you want to split the object into 9 equal parts divide 610 by 4 which is 152.5 cut the objects in four places 152.5 mm in the positive and negative X and Y Direction I suggest you rename each piece a different letter so that you can keep track of them save each piece as a different STL file now if you want to go right into printing rightclick the object and then click split to separate disable all except the piece you want to print and move them off the plate now you're good to go and you can slice hope you guys enjoyed the video if I helped you out at all it'd be great if you liked commented and subscribed see you guys next time bye

Channel: Dumb Engineer

Views: 9,424

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d modeling, printing a city, no blender, sketchup, easy, bambulabs, 3d print, modeling a city, architecture

Id: mp0ZlRSpaeU

Length: 5min 42sec (342 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2024