FreeCAD: Output Quality / Resolution For Better 3D Models | Printing (STL etc)

hi viewers and welcome to the channel and today we're going to be looking at this model and we're going to be outputting it as an stl file but we're going to change some settings in there to change the resolution of the output and compare and contrast them in a 3d package like blender to find the best output that we can get so this is good for changing the output to allow you to 3d print out much higher quality and these are some of the outputs that we've got i've changed the view mode on here so you can actually see the tessellation and we're going to check this in blender to see what these output look like in an external source so this is good for anything like 3d printing or using your model in blender to get the best results if you like what you're seeing please subscribe to the site i also have a co-fire or coffee site that you can donate to if you so desire and that's at ko hyphen fi dot com forward slash min g0 i also run a patreon where you can subscribe and get extra content and that's at www.patreon.com for slash mango jelly solutions any money that's kindly donated will be used to span the channel so this is the model we're going to export it's an f1 wingnut and what we're going to do is change the properties of this to see the effects on the stl file so the first thing i'm going to do is actually come up to the view and we can come down to the draw style and select flat lines now at the moment this is not really showing anything but once we get the stl out we'll be able to see what that looks like or even if we go into the mesh workbench and prepare this for htr export then we'll be able to see it then what we'll normally do is come up to file and go export and first of all we need to select an object so we can select anything in here whether it's pads pockets etc we select the last action because we want to export out the whole file and file export and we can automatically output this as an stl file so this one here this is going to be straight export so i'm going to name this straight export so we can see the differences so it's come out as an stl file and if we import that back in file import and go back to our stl there it is now we can see what quality has been exported out as let's just hide this attractive helix so we can see what we got so this is it here it looks quite nice so let's see the differences when we actually change some of the stl settings to actually export this out well some of the actual export sends to do that we need the mesh workbench which comes standard with freecad so come down to mesh design and we're just going to come in here and just hide that straight export so that was a straight export from file export and we specified the file extension and we specify file type as stl mesh let's bring back our subtractive helix and let's try something else now to convert this to a mesh we need to select the actual object we need so the last action come to meshes and create mesh from shape when we click on this what will happen is we'll have a number of options and we've got these two important ones which is surface deviation and angular deviation so if we export out from any cad package you'll see that we have a number of options in there and these are them in this one so this affects the faceting of the stl file and it's all to do with tessellation so you'll have options in there such as cool length polygon count deviation and the tolerance for the angular deviation as well and we see two here the surface deviation and the angular deviation so the lower the deviation is the finer the tessellation is and for the angular deviation the output is more accurate to the original form and that brings out the finer details if you're bringing out the finer details you're making a more accurate mesh and also you're adding more quality in there therefore the higher the file size so you've got this balance between file size and obviously memory consumption and the resolution of your model high resolution means bigger file size bigger memory usage so as default we have a deviation of 0.10 millimeters i'm going to drop this down to dawn point north one millimeter and we're going to see the differences that makes let's hit okay now you see we have this subtractive helix meshed here so this is the result we'll just transform that over so we've got a nice quality output and this is the original that it came from let's have a look at the sto output that was produced with a straight forward export so let's bring this one in and straight away let's hide the subtractive helix underneath you can see the differences we've got higher resolution just by changing that deviation much much higher resolution let's do the same but let's give it the defaults and compare it with the original and the one that's at naught point naught one millimeter for deviation so i'm just gonna bring back this attractive helix which is underneath and we'll come back to meshes great mesh from shape and we need to change this because at the moment it's gone into a much lower dimension so before it was 0.10 millimeters and that was the default so let's okay that we can see that was much quicker to output let's hide that subtractive helix and hide the straight export and you can see the differences between those so we've got much higher resolution on the right and if we bring back the original and right click transform so this was the straight output and put it by the side okay let's zoom in you can see we've got some differences there as well so this one here is a straight output and this one is the one with a 0.10 millimeter deviation there and then a higher res one to the right is here so you can see the differences between those and this really shows when you pull it into something like blender and see the differences in there let's try out the angle now the angular deviation so we're going to just hide these and bring back that's attractive helix count to meshes create mesh from shape and we'll leave the surface deviation as it is and just drop this down let's say to one degree and hit okay you can see this is taking a lot longer to output now so we're looking at a more high resolution mesh and there it is so let's hide also underneath it so i try to have helix and bring back that mesh and we've got something that's really high in definition perhaps a bit too high for what it is but we'll keep a hold of that and have a look at the file sizes and what it looks like in blender let's change this one rename it angular 1 degree now we've got this one which was the deviation 10 and this one which was deviation one and we've got the straight export there so we've got three or four different models there now because i've moved them they will all have a different center of origin or center of rotation when i export these because i've transformed them out so that will show up in something like blender as well what we'll do is we'll highlight all of these go file export and that's not going to help so we need to export one by one so that's that one's already been exported says for this one we'll export this one as deviation one save and then this one and save those so it's pretty easy to actually change these in freecad now there is another export let's just hide those and bring back our helix and we'll do the same we'll go to meshes great mesh from shape this time we'll come down to the netgen and we can change this one to whatever resolution we want so let's go for very course and hit ok so that one's working away at the moment and let's see what we get so that's exported out let's hide that original helix and let's see what we have we have something quite different so look at the face makeup the tessellation in here and it's a lot different to what we originally had with the others so it's quite a nice effect actually so we're going to try this one out as well and if we compare that with say the deviation 10 mil and just hide you can see how the tessellation that makes up this looks very different to what we have with this one so let's export this one out as well and we just call this one mesher so looking at the files we can see that we've got the straight export at 1.1 megabytes then we've got the deviation which is set to standard 0.10 at 374.8 kilobytes which is smaller than the straight export which is interesting then we've got the deviation of 0.01 at 1.7 megabytes so it's getting larger in size there then we've got the angular 1 degree at 7 megabytes then we've got the mesher which is interesting because this took the longest to come out and that was at 2.2 megabytes so that was actually smaller than the angular 1 degree which took less time to come out so it's going to be interesting the results we get from these so let's have a look at the results so i'm going to import these one by one import stl file we'll go for the straight export first simple this one so with this one we can see that we've got we can see the lines on this surface here so we can see these lines and coming around i mean look at the fins you can see the lines as well so it's a good model but we can see the surface artifacts in there let's try something else so let's try another one file import stl and let's go for the deviation the standard deviation so out the box this one here that's just doing a standard output and look at them both side by side they're very similar so you can see how similar those are so this one here is the one that's got the standard deviation and this one here is the standard seo output so they do look yeah they are slightly different so that's import another one file import stl so let's look at our deviation with zero zero one so this was not all point one so this should be of a higher quality that took a little bit longer to come in now let's bring this around and you can see already that we have a much tighter cleaner surface so that's much better we've still got some artifacts on there just a few lines there's a much cleaner surface that one so that's changing the deviation from 0.10 to 0.01 and now we'll pull in the angular 1 degree this one here so import this one is obviously much higher resolution that took a while to come in so it's placed over here let's move that and what i'm hoping let's bring this over so compared to the other one and compare it here you can see how clean this is this is really clean so this is better than this one here which was the deviation with no point not one selected the angle of one degree really did help and that really cleaned up that model now let's have a look at the mesh let's see what that one's like so far import stl and come down and pick the mesher and import stl now let's bring that one up and they're coming really quick so don't think it's higher resolution as the others and straight away you can see the surface especially inside look at this surface here we can see the tessellation in there so a lot of tessellation in there got half the other model coming through there so let's bring that up over that compared to something like this one which was the angle one degree and we can see the difference so look inside there i can see that's much better so there you have it those are the different exports that we've tried and we can see the different results so the best one that i would choose is this angle one degree so there's a nice big output lots of information in there and a much cleaner output all together so i hope you found that useful and i hope to see you again in the new video if you like what you're seeing please subscribe to the site i also have a co-fire or coffee site that you can donate to if you so desire and that's at ko hyphen fi.com for slash ming0 also run a patreon where you can subscribe and get extra content and that's at www.patreon.com for slash mango jelly solutions any money that's kindly donated will be used to expand the channel thanks a lot for watching and subscribing and i'll see you again soon

Channel: MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD

Views: 14,050

Keywords: CAD, three, 3D, CNC, Printing, solidworks, autoCAD, freecad 0.19, freecad 19, freecad basics, basic course, fundamentals, learn freecad, freecad beginners, freeCAD 0.20

Id: v6FgTIpsCKo

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2022