Cut and key Blender 2.93

okay so i'm gonna redo my cut and key video because i've i noticed that i'm doing things just a tiny bit differently there's a little bit of a change in 2.93 and well 2.93 is around right and i know i prefer um tutorials on the current version of blender so we're going to redo it and very little has changed i do things just a tiny bit differently and i'll explain why as we go along so here is the model we're going to cut up it's a little raygun keychain and you can see it's a small thing it's a keychain right and look at all of these tiny little indents and and things like that if we were to print it like with this part facing the bed and you'd have to have supports all in here it would be a nightmare to clean up it would add time to the print it would waste plastic and it's a pain right so even if we even if we printed it like this right with this part here down flat against the bed we'd need supports all on this underside and they would get all up in here and it would be really difficult to clean up and it would make it not really worth printing in my opinion so this is why we cut and key we'll cut the model in half we'll have three parts we'll have part one a key and part two and it will print without supports and it will print beautifully and um it will save you a lot of time and a lot of hassle so let's show you how we can do that okay so we got our part we got a part centered let's add a cube now right now the cube is so large it's 2 000 millimeters it's encompassing the entire scene so let's shrink it down so it appears and then we're going to hit s to scale it on an sx to scale it on the x axis and then we'll move it down and we hit s z to scale it on the z axis and we're going to scale a little more basically all it has to do is encapsule the model but i like a little space right and then i usually go and double check now that is pretty good right hit x-ray is it's not really perfect it looks like it's a shade closer on this side i can move it over but it doesn't really matter you don't have to be like on the atomic level perfectly centered as long as you are close enough you're good right so now we're going to save this because we want this cutter saved in the main file and i'll show you what i mean by main file in a second so now we're going to select the part we'll go into the modifiers and select boolean now here is a tiny bit of a difference the deference um modifier has two different types of solvers now from what i understand fast is the solver that we're used to it's the one we've always used exact is what it does if we go here right now i'm going to select the cutter i'm going to hit shift d to duplicate it and i'll move it out a little bit and then we'll scale it on the x now you see all of this crazy shimmery stuff going on here in here is what's happening is the planes for each box are on the exact same level so they're sort of interacting with one another and if you were to try to cut it oops and you can use you can click on it in this case there's only two but i like the eye dropper see how the whole thing now has gone funny that means you're probably gonna get messy geometry and you're gonna have to clean it up or it's gonna be a nightmare however if you click exact it takes that into account it fixes everything and you get a nice neat clean cut however we're not doing that kind of cut today all right let's get rid of that so what we're going to do here is we're just going to cut it in half so we make sure deference fast and then we select the box and there you go cuts it right in half we're going over here and apply the cut and now we've cut the model exactly in half groovy groovy i like to come in here add a one to it so that i know that this is side one now it's really important that you do not move this you want to keep it exactly where it is and i'll show you why in a bit so we're going to go file save as so important that you save as you don't want to save over the original yet you want to create a new file right so we're going to call this raygun mini1 so we have a new file with this half of the model in it now we've saved that we're gonna go open recent and we're gonna go back to the main file now here's where the magic happens we select the cube and then we go back here and we take this and we slide it over now this has not moved the face that's cutting the middle of the model it's exactly in it's in exactly the same spot so it will bisect the model exactly in half so now you have the other half of the model however here's the thing you want to go back into edit mode by hitting tab i'm going to hit a to select all then you want to go into a mesh and you want to go down here to normals and you want to recalculate the outside and why you want to do that is because if you don't recalculate the normals this will create a non-manifold manifold cut which is easily fixable but this will save you from having to fix it so we're going to select the model we're going to go modifiers boolean deference fast eyedropper select the cube there we go and it cuts it right in half we're going to apply it and we'll delete the cube i do like to check these just to make sure select vitrate non-manifold good if you send a non-manifold model over your slicer it's not going to print well okay so now we have the other half i like to name it all right so we're going to add a 2 into that and then we're going to file save as don't want to save over anything yet i like to keep all three parts maybe i gotta go back i gotta fix something i gotta do something so then i'll have the main one with the cutter in it i'll have part one and part two i'll have all the pieces now this is just me i prefer to do the cutting and the keying in part one it doesn't really matter you can do it in part two you can do it in part one you can create another file and do it in that it's all it's up to you so we're gonna save this because we've renamed it as a new file and then i'm gonna go open recent part one and i'm gonna go file append yeah we go reagan mini 2 object and boom now because you didn't move anything it's brought it in exactly lined up perfectly with part one you are good to go as is like this so now i'm going to select part one and i'm going to hit h to hide it now i am going to hit shift right mouse button to move this 3d cursor exactly on the face of the model and why that's helpful is when you go add mesh cube and let's shrink that down so we can see it look it puts it perfectly in the center of the model so you don't have to mess around with moving it back and forth to get it perfectly centered as you can see it's a little too close to that outer edge and your slicer will probably leave a hole in the model so let's see what we have all right 10 for the y now that's way bigger than it needs to be so we can definitely cut that down and even the z look how tall that is that's that's way taller than it needs to be and then i'm gonna scale it on x and you can scale it whatever you want the bigger keys are just easier to deal with i like everything to be nice even numbers and that's going to be my key right so now we're going to have all three parts of this part one the key and part two in part one of the file so now we're ready to cut the hole for this key and i like my keys to be kind of snug because really for me the main point of them is so that when i'm gluing parts together they don't slide around right because there's nothing worse than when you've got mitched mismatched sides and you can't really fix it because there's too much detail and now you got to print it over again that's really what my keys are for and also someone had asked me why i don't leave the key in one side in the comments of the previous video and this is pretty much why like let's pretend we were going to print this um face down on the bed right this side you'd have to add supports for all this underside and while this would be easier to clean up like i said i don't want to waste plastic i don't want to add time to my print i just want to i want a flat side on all of my parts so that they can sit on flat on the bed so i don't have to clean up any any supports i don't have to throw away any plastic that i could use i don't have to add time to my prints so this is why i cut and key to make models easier and faster to print okay so now one other thing um in the other video okay so you have to uh if i was to cut um a slot for this key exactly the same size as the key it would not fit uh though there's just you know 3d printing especially you know i have an ender three they're not super exact uh the plastic expands a little bit you have you know over extrusion you have whatever the issue is the key will not fit and i was using i believe point 17 of a millimeter before and it was just too little and i ended up spending a lot of time sanding which is why i like to use square keys right it's easier to hold on to easier to sand if you use round keys one they're harder to print and two um they're they're they're a nightmare to sand so i i prefer using square keys and also i've i've started um uniforming my keys so you know five millimeters is kind of a regular size for me because that way let's say you have a model with five keys in it and if all the keys are the same size you don't have to go hunts to see which key fits in which slot you can grab any key and put it in any slot and you'll be good right however i make them a little bit i i i do them a little bit differently so point 17 of a millimeter was way too small but let's look at how we're going to print this right so we're going to print this like this right this is going to be flat on the bed now i use a duct parts cooler so that it makes bridging better but even even though it bridges well it still sags a little on the top so since this y-axis here is going to be the top i add a little more space on my y-axis than i do on the other axises so so for the x on this i'm going to add um 25 all right let's do half a millimeter right so that means that's a quarter of a millimeter on each side now the y i'm gonna add one millimeter because both parts of this both parts of this are going to have a top and they're both going to sag a little bit so you want just that extra space right now these now this one i'm just going to add a 5.5 millimeter now if you always add the same amount of space you're always it's going to be easy to remember how much to remove when you save your key and you have to make sure you remove this extra space otherwise your key won't fit so i'm going to select the model go into my boolean modifiers on difference fast select the key apply it and here we'll hide it and you can see we have a nice keyhole now select the model i'll hit tab i'll go on x-ray and i'm just going to check and make sure that it's non-manifold and it is all right that rather that it's manifold okay so now we will hide this part we'll go to part one and we'll rename that key okay now i'll hit ctrl 1 to show me the opposite side and we'll do the same thing all over again we'll select the model we'll go boolean fast deference fast we'll select the key apply the cut hide the key for just a second take a look at the cut and then we'll check it and it's good okay now at this point i'm gonna unhide everything and i'm gonna save everything in part one right so now i have all three pieces of this model in part one i've saved it i'm going to save it again just because i'm paranoid now here's where it gets tricky you got to be really careful that you don't save over things i'm gonna select part one and part two and then i'm gonna delete them right so now we have just the key i'm going to go file save as really important you save as if you save over something you will be unhappy now i'm going to rename this key and i'm also going to file export stl now i have a little directory structure here that i always use and we're gonna save the key in the stl folder then i'll go file save open recent we'll go back to one now i'm gonna delete part one be really careful with this you can screw things up here and you'll be sorry so now we have part two now i'm gonna go file save as i'm gonna save part two now sometimes blender doesn't wanna save over i really don't know why this is let's see if we have problems nope it saved it fine if it won't save over the original part two i just save it as part two and i put a b and then i go back and i delete the original part two i rename the the one that has the b in it to just two and you're good so what i'll do here we'll go to three now i'll hit r for rotate minus 90. right now that's going to move it nice and flat i'll hit seven to go up now i like to plant print with the long part of the print on the y-axis supposedly it's more accurate i don't know if that's true it's just what i've gotten a habit of doing okay so now we'll go file export stl go back to the stl folder it's already named reagan mini 2 stl so we'll export it i will save it again because i'm paranoid and then we'll go open recent part one now we have the key and we have part two saved in their own file so we don't need them in here anymore right make sure you've selected the right thing part two and the key this is why naming helps you can make sure that you don't delete something you need so i will hit x and then delete now we have part one in its own file i'll save that and then i'm going to hit r for rotate 90 and 7 just to check its orientation and it's fine so now i will go file export stl back to the stl folder and then we're good we're done with this part okay we can save that now let's go to cura okay here's cura opened up and ready and let's go into my stl folder and here's my three parts now look at this they come in perfectly right look at those parts are flat on the bottom everything's set up the only thing i would change is this i like i said i like to print the long part on the y-axis i don't know if it really matters and and i would probably also just because i like to keep everything as close to the center as possible you know what i even think i would do this let's see now i don't like that either i like to keep things as close to the center of the bed as humanly possible that's really what's worked out best for me flip that around that way okay and see and this is going to give you a beautiful print right no supports to clean up it's going to be near perfect so that's how i cut and key in blender 2.93 so i just happen to have a print of the file i just showed you and as you can see here is the cut and keyed version and let's see how well you can see that printed grate right

Channel: Harold D

Views: 1,097

Keywords: Blender, Blender 3D, 3D Modeling, Cut and Key, No Supports, 3D Printing

Id: ldse2Qh0jcQ

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021