Cleaning Up Architectural Scale Models for 3D Printing | Expert Tips #sketchup

hey guys I'm Erin and today I want to talk about preparing architectural models for 3D printing so any of you who know me know that uh I like SketchUp uh and I also like 3D printing I do a lot of 3D printing uh I even wrote a book on 3D printing um I like the idea of taking something that doesn't exist or something exists only in imagination or or something like that and create it and and making into a real world thing so today I want to talk about doing that but with architectural models I know it's there's there's so many things if you're in 3D printing You' probably been on the sites where you download models or you've created stuff in SketchUp and you know made stuff that sits on your desk or uh you know busts of famous people or whatever but um there's something cool about taking an existing model a design a building that you're going to create and and printing it out at scale um there's some caveats to that though and that's exactly the things that we're going to talk about right now all right so I have a simplified model here by simplified I mean this is already a solid so it is just it's one big piece so things like if I zoom in here let's look uh the shutters you see here actually come back to the wall um I don't have mions or anything like that these aren't clear pieces I can't see inside in fact inside if we were to let's go ahead and just pop our head in here we'll go break through this window you can see that inside is just a big empty space so this is already a solid I didn't go through that process um we've done other videos on creating solids that sort of thing uh if there's enough demand if if you really want to see how this process works taking from a full uh model out to a solid um let me know in the comments and we could possibly do that but it's not a quick it's not an easy process if this is a model that was created for you know architectural drawings where I have things broken into the top floor bottom floor uh interior walls doors trim all that stuff there's a lot of stuff that has to get deleted out um I'd like to say it's as simple as grabbing it all and say make an outer shell sometimes you can get pretty close but realistically you end up deleting a lot of your tags you know just the all the interior groups all the all the everything that's not going to be seen on the outside and then unfortunately is a lot of work of cleaning up architectural details getting rid of some stuff um if I'm going to 3D print this at scale uh there's some stuff that I know I don't need I don't like this house has gutters but that's not on there because that little super I mean think about how thick the material of a gutters that little piece of she sheet metal think about how thin that is now print that out at qu e inch equals a foot you know it's almost nothing so there's some details that just don't come along um door knobs is a perfect example too this this model did have a door knob uh I took it off because again it's going to be the size of a head of a pin once I print it out so that's the first point is certain details don't need to come along there's some stuff I could have done in here there's there's brick on the front of this building I could have put that brick in and tried to see if I could get that detail to show up in the print um I have seen models where uh shingles will were drawn and and actually showed up in the print so that would be possible too but generally speaking again if I'm going depending on how small I'm going to print this that's the other thing if I print this and it's like you know a foot high I'm printing it in big chunks on a on a large format printer well that could work that could uh I could leave more detail in I'm not I'm printing this on a print bed of less than 6 in wide so this is going to be fairly small so that's actually the first thing we would talk about here right I'm going to take this group I'm going to just copy it over here and I'm going to take it and I'm going to scale it down I'm going to bring it this way and let's see what uh let's see what 0 2% so 02 is 2% of the original size let's see how big that is okay so if I draw a line from here to here it's going to tell me that's 9 in so this is already tooo big big this is still too big so I'm going to undo undo and I'm going to take this and I'm going to scale it again I'm going to scale it to 0.1% so one 100th of the size so 1% of the of the actual size this is modeled 1: one of course you can see that so here's my life scale figure yep all the same size so if I do that if I scale to 1% right it's be 4 in across so that's actually a pretty big print for a small printer but you can kind of get an idea of how big that's going to be now before we go any further well let's let's look at this let's say I was to take this export this as a solid throw it out to my printer and hit print what would happen well some stuff is not going to make it through um let's look at let's look at these columns columns are the first thing I always check out columns these look good these are this is what they look on the like on the real building if I check this it tells me uh it's I don't know it's about a 16th of an inch well about a 16th inch isn't good enough so one of the things I do when I'm working with 3D prints is I generally change my units so I'm going to go to settings this is under SketchUp on Mac it's under the Windows window or the windows menu on Windows and I'm going to actually that's the wrong one I do that often I'm sorry for both of us we're just going to go to Windows go to model info and we're going to go to units in units I'm going to change to decimal and then I'm going to change to 2 mm um I can do that for the other two also but right now I'm just really concerned about checking some Dimensions so if I come in here and I draw a line from here to here it tells me that is about 1 mm um depending on the Fidelity of your printer that is doable but assuming I'm printing it standing up like this that means a bunch of little tiny squares that are 1 millimeter are going to get drawn over and over and over again coming up like this uh that's sort of a red flag for potential failure so it's possible you could try it but I don't know how well that's going to look uh some other things here um and spoiler I did try to print this exactly like this at scale and I think these printed but the support material I put in here to support this uh roof right here when I remove that I just demolished these posts so I don't actually know if they printed well or not uh the support material removal process says killed them so um let's look at a window let's look at this window right over here so let's see from here to here that's half a millimeter and this depth here is also half a millimeter so think about how thick half a millimeter is that's not so the the print head's going to come along here come out come over come back oh this is even smaller let's look what's this this is125 mm so that is a really small move so it is possible that if I print this model at scale as it is now this will show up but odds are good it's going to kind of look like a little melted rectangle on the side of it and that is exactly what it looks like you can barely see this bump right here this bump in is kind of there but again as it prints the print head moves and it kind of it doesn't make these perfectly sharp edges like I see right here it's going to kind of you know it curves them in a little bit with just the the nature of fdm melted material printing and this ends up looking kind of blurry like real life out of focus so that's what happens to all the windows the other details I have on here little little Z's on these uh Barn Door shutters right here they're tiny two less than a millimeter and how deep are they again1 1259 mm so very very small this stuff's all going to get lost it's going to look like a little bump out on the side of it uh same with these up here they come out a little bit longer so what is that it's almost a MIM but still super super small so all these details oh this is when I do I did when I first printed this this right here quarter of a millimeter uh tall detail right here didn't didn't show up at all so in the slicing so horizont you can be even more conscious about horizontal Dimension or horizontal uh features think about again printing it's the head's going to come along like this and draw each of these pieces right here uh the average uh quality that I print at is 0 2 millim per layer so if I come right here I'm going to draw a line like this take that line and I'm going to move it up vertically 2 mm now 220x didn't 2x there we go so this is what each so every time the print head comes along this is how much of this wall it's going to draw so if you compare that Dimension to this relief right here it's less than two lines so I can say with less than two lines it's probably not going to give me enough and I know it doesn't give me enough Dimension there to actually show that so that these lines in the garage door dis appear completely when I actually print this out at this scale so what to do that's the question well fortunately I can show you here I have two models this is the same one this is the scale down version and then what I actually sent to the printer so look at some of the stuff that I have in here so first thing is the columns right yes I lose some of the detail I lose some of the the the triple column here the double column here and I just put in one big blocky thing but this one big blocky thing all the way across here is just a little over a millimeter so this is not huge this is not going to look uh big and awkward it's just going to have it's well it's going to exist like I said these got knocked out look at my door look at my windows up here this is what I ended up creating so this still doesn't come out real far from the the face let's see how far out does it come so it's still only a quarter deep but you can see the windows push in a lot deeper that's almost 3/4 of of a millimeter there so this just gives me more detail this gives me depth that I can actually see when I look at the print same with the garage door look at the garage door right here I just made those little insets bigger and they're exaggerate one of the things to remember when you 3D print on a fdm printer is that when it prints it's going to it's melting plastic and that plastic is going to move it's going to expand it's going to contract that sort of thing so these exaggerated details I see here it does not look ridiculous when you actually print them again this is a little teeny thing that's going to sit on my desk this is the kind of detail you want I would say most detail should be nothing less than half a millimeter so I would actually probably if I print this again probably pull this out a little bit more just to give myself a little bit more depth a little more detail um and like I said just you got to go a little bit bigger so while while like look at these look at this one right here so these are two they kind of squished into one but again this is just just raising off the surface so that actually can see right here just a little teeny bump wasn't even noticeable so when you are printing architectural models for for 3D printing this is the kind of thing you should have in your head you want to have these exaggerated deeper details you want to have larger than real life pieces in here and this is just for exterior interior same thing comes into play uh you know a three and a half inch a 4 inch interior wall at 1% scale is super thin you may have to bump all your walls up to like 8 in interior just to get them to show up in the print granted I could print this on a SLA printer something does a little finer detail when it prints but I'm still going to have limitations with how thick a material can be before it's too fragile it's going to break uh while printing it needs additional support that kind of thing so exaggerating making things bigger is kind of the key to get successful architectural prints out of SketchUp so these are a lot of rules of thumb that I have come across this is not comprehensive this is not exhaustive by any means but these are the kind of things that I have learned when I when I first started 3D printing the first printer I ever used one of the first things I printed was a multi-story house and they had you know each floor was a separate model printed you could look down inside of it and I tried to print alt scale and it was just a total failure um the doors I ended up creating ended up being like 6in wide slabs in the walls were like maybe even a foot thick or something like that um this was granted technology when I first started printing is not as advanced the printers weren't as good as they are now but I had to really beef everything up just to make it come out printable Make It Real at all so um yeah anyhow those are some rules that I have those are some ideas of of things you can do to take your architectural models there now and make them 3D printable it's not quick it's not easy there's not just a simple balloon this up button um so it is a little bit of work to get in there and make that happen but it is totally doable so and and really at the end having a architectural model you can just print out by yourself it is it is pretty cool if you like that video click like down below and if you haven't already please do subscribe we create several videos each and every week and you'll be notified of all of them if you subscribe most importantly though leave us a comment Down Below have you used SketchUp for 3D printing have used it for architectural printing if so I'd love to hear what you learned and if you have any notes that you think others would like to hear if you can think of something else you think would make a good video leave that down in the comments below we like making these videos a lot we like them even more when they're showing something you want to see thank you

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 3,873

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling

Id: hhJA69nXlTs

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024