Exporting ZBrush Jewelry Files for 3D Printing

hi i'm scott from the rear grundy tech team and today i'm going to show you how to export your zbrush models for 3d printing so let's get started okay so i've got my completed ring here and the first thing we need to do is take a look at it so i've got my ring shank here i've got a four prong uh oval stone and the the gemstone in here as well so when we're getting ready for 3d printing we need to make sure that all of our sub tools that we're going to be printing are one unified mesh that's what they are referring to when they say a watertight model with 3d printing i'm going to open up my subtool palette and you can see my three subtools here now the stone i don't need to export the stone for 3d printing so i'm actually just going to go ahead and delete that so i've got it selected in my subtool palette and i'm going to click delete and then click ok there's a couple ways to make this a unified mesh and i'm going to show you two of them today we're going to be doing that with dynamesh and with booleans so the first one i'm going to show you is dynamesh if you've created your model in dynamesh already you can go ahead and use this step since this was not created in dynamesh i'm going to go ahead and turn it on real quick so i'm going to navigate to the geometry palette my ring is selected uh click on the dynamesh menu and go ahead and turn it on so the next step is to unify these two together and the way we're going to do that is i'm going to make sure that my top sub tool or my ring is selected and in my subtool palette i'm going to go down to merge and i'm going to do a merge down and when you do that this message will pop up just click ok and now we have merged those two subtools into one sub tool and now i will re-dynamesh so hold ctrl click and drag and release and now it is one solid dynameshed model now if i zoom in here uh take a look at some of the corners where the geometry was overlapping see the reason we're doing this is because before my head was just overlapping the geometry of my ring and that internal geometry can cause issues with 3d printing so you want to make sure that that internal geometry is eliminated and and that's what we've done with this step and and what we'll do with the boolean step as well so where it connected and got rid of that internal geometry you can see i've got a bit of a rough edge here so that's not a big issue you can go in with a smooth brush and smooth it out if you wish but i will remind you that with jewelry it's it's going to be much smaller than it looks on the screen so you're not really going to notice it at all so i wouldn't worry about spending a lot of time to clean up those edges you really don't have to worry about it so the next thing we need to do now that we have our unified mesh is we need to look at our poly count so right now i'm sitting just under 2 million polys for this model now depending on the support software for your 3d printer that you're using you may want to bring that poly count down because when you're turning your screen to say add supports and things like that if it's trying to render a lot of geometry like a really dense model then most likely as you turn it you're going to be looking at a slideshow and everything is going to be really sluggish so we need to decimate this first and i like to aim under half million polys if i can i've in the support software programs that i've tried under half million works just fine and especially if you're going to be printing multiples you do want to bring the poly count down just to make things a little easier on yourself and make it go quicker so the way that i like to decimate these models is in the z plugin menu up here there's a plugin called decimation master and what decimation master will do is it will it will look at your model here i'll zoom in real quick it'll look at the model and determine what areas can be high poly and what areas can be low poly so around these edges here these corners on this head are going to be a little higher poly so it can keep that dimensional accuracy and then the flat areas here like on the side of this rail or on the top of the ring it's going to do lower poly because those don't require a higher poly count so in my decimation master plug-in the first thing we want to do is to pre-process so this is when it will actually look at the mesh and see where those high and low poly areas will need to be so there's two options there's pre-process current and pre-process all the current option will pre-process the currently selected subtool and pre-process all will pre-process all of the subtools in your list here since we only have one sub tool i'm going to go ahead and click pre-process current and now it's going to look at that mesh and see where those high and low poly areas need to be and you'll get a progress bar up here at the top and it usually doesn't take very long it's a very quick process so maybe around 30 seconds or so is uh pretty standard for this poly count so that's it now i can go back into the decimation master and down here is the decimate option so i'm going to click decimate current and now it's done now you can see the model didn't change at all but my poly count went down to about 385 000 so now this is perfect for exporting out and 3d printing and if i turn on poly frames and zoom in you can kind of see what it did so you can see around these edges higher poly count on these flatter edges a much much lower poly count same around here it this plugin is really good at keeping the dimensional accuracy your model just be careful and don't push it too far because the if you push it into really low poly counts it really has no choice but to start changing the way the model looks so now we're ready for exporting so i'm going to go back into the z plugin menu and open up my 3d print hub and the first thing we want to do is to click update size ratios so it will look at the unit measurements of my model and asked me to assign a real world unit for those numbers whether that's in inches or in millimeters so here's the numbers the unit measurements of my model 21.43 by 6.25 by 19.21 and it's just asking inches or millimeters and with jewelry you're typically working in millimeters so i'm going to go ahead and click that and go back into the 3d print hub and you can see those numbers have now populated in these boxes here so the last thing i can do is go ahead and export to stl so i can click on that give it a name and once you've exported it you'll get this little message here saying files were successfully exported and just click on that to make that message go away so now i can go to my support software and i'm going to be using the support software for the forum labs printers this is the their software is called preform so now i can go in and open this up grab my file and there it is so i can turn this so it's right side up and that's it now it is ready to have supports put on it and i can go ahead and get it ready for 3d printing and as you'll notice because i decimated it i can move the screen around very easily because we've brought the poly count down so if i want to add a whole bunch more on this platform it's not going to bog down the computer too much okay so let's let's look at the second method so i'm actually going to reopen my file that we started with so same thing as before i don't need to keep this stone so i'm going to make sure that it's selected in my subtool palette and click delete so the second method we're going to be using to make this a unified mesh is booleans and i'll show you here in a sec what the main difference is because there's a couple couple things to be aware of when you're preparing these for 3d printing for a more complete education on booleans make sure to watch our boolean video we go a bit more in depth about how these booleans work and how to do it in different ways but i'm going to make sure that my my ring is selected i'm going to click on this arrow here to show zbrush where i want the boolean to start and i'm going to make sure that this option here these little two circles for boolean edition is selected it's on by default so i could also turn on live boolean but you're not going to see any changes because we are adding these two together so that you won't see any any difference there so everything from my boolean is ready to go so in my subtool palette go down to the boolean sub menu and click on make boolean mesh so now i have my new unified mesh in my tool palette here i can click on that and here we go and if i zoom in on these corners here you can see it's much sharper much crisper you can get a much cleaner edge with booleans when i brought this model in i was hovering around 90 000 polys so this one is is pretty low poly uh to the point where i don't even have to decimate it uh i'm well under the half million polys that i typically shoot for when i'm bringing it into my support software so so this is i don't have to worry about that i can go ahead and skip that step so we got everything unified i'm going to go back into my z plug-in menu and back to the 3d print hub as you'll recall before first thing we need to do is click update size ratios it's the same measurements as before because it's the same ring so i'm going to make sure to click on millimeters go back in those have now populated and i can export as a stl file now before i do uh one quick mention a really nice part about the form labs support software preform is that in zbrush by with your installation you do have the option to send this file directly to preform i still would recommend saving an stl and keeping it with an editable file just for safe keeping uh it's it is good practice to keep an editable file along with a print file in case you need to make any changes after you print just it's it's good practice so i can go ahead and export as stl and give it a name and there we go now it's exported click on that message to make it go away and now go back into preform so i'm going to open it up and bring that in and here's why i wanted to show you both methods so we didn't get this message with dynamesh but with booleans we did so it's actually found some geometry in that model that it doesn't like so it's actually giving us this message saying that these models could potentially be damaged and need repair so preform has a really effective repair algorithm built into it which does a really good job at fixing models but i want to show you why this message popped up and i'm actually going to go back to zbrush real quick and i'm going to turn on polyframes so so here's my model you can see i did a bit of cleanup with the sculptor's pro just to kind of smooth out a few rough edges but the part i want to show you is right here where everything was joined so you can see i've got different sizes and arrangements of quads kind of coming together where these two overlapped and it's created a number of triangles to try to make sure that these cinch together the way they should be uh anywhere where it's overlapping you'll see these kinds of triangles now most likely this is where that message is coming from it's looking at some one of these areas it's finding something that it doesn't like and it's asking us to repair it so be careful with booleans you can you can break a model booleans are very complicated so just make sure that if you are seeing any kind of print failures or anything like that you may want to run your files through a repair software or just do a dynamesh on it dynamesh is are really good at making sure you get a nice uniform surface so i can go back to preform and since the repair algorithm is really good i can just hit repair and it will go ahead and do the hard work for me turn this the right side up here now when i have these two side by side so i have my dynamesh one and my boolean one you don't really see any difference you don't see these harsh corners until i zoom in really far so either of them are totally viable methods and again it's it's low poly so i can still move my screen around freely with no issues there so yeah both methods work well you do get a little sharper edges when you're doing booleans but just be careful you can break the model when you're doing those boolean commands dynamesh is a little more consistent in that regard so that's pretty much it both of these models are ready for supports and ready for 3d printing and they appear to be the right size so i can print them out see what they look like and take it from there so that's it if you have any questions feel free to contact us

Channel: Rio Grande

Views: 4,639

Keywords: 3d printing, cad, cam, digital production, digital manufacturing, z brush, zbrush, 3d manufacturing, modeling, prototypes, rapid prototyping

Id: l6yBhyfKmOs

Length: 16min 51sec (1011 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020