How to hollow a model in Blender for 3d printing

to hollow a cube in blender is very easy there you go all you need is a cube and here's one right here that's very handy all you need to do to hollow it is go over to the modifiers tab click on modifiers add modifier generate solidify turn x-ray mode on so you can see it and increase the thickness there you go you have a hollow box even a pointy cube is easy in blender select the Box turn x-ray mode on so you can see it add a modifier generate solidify increase thickness notice that it isn't particularly even click even thickness and get something that's pretty even it's actually surprisingly even but what if we have something like this if we try the same procedure click on the body go over to the modifiers tab add modifiers generate solidify let's turn the x-ray mode on and increases thickness something reasonable like that we turn x-ray mode off oh something to our face our fingers and I presume the toes yes well this is the problem the solidify modifier can't handle when it intersects with itself and these fingers are very very thin as are the toes the reason that the face has gone horrible is because this model has an internal eyes and mouth and they have got solidify modifiers on them as well so it's pretty much a mess what magic on the solidify mod if I we going to use to fix that and before I do that I just want to say why we might want to use blender for doing this in the first place I would normally recommend that if you're going to hollow your model then you do it in your slicer either Chu box or ly Lighty ly ly because it does a very good job but it has to be said that with blender you can have complete control over where you put your Hollow you can have it in one leg you can have it in the head and in the Torso and you can adjust the thickness you can have different thicknesses of hollow for different places as long as you know how to do it of course one other advantage of doing it in blender is that if you want to put holes in your model for draining resin if you're 3D printing it's much much easier and more precise to do that with blender all you need is cylinders or whatever shape you like and a Boolean once you have a hollow model of course so how are we going to do the solidify modifier to make this model Hollow we're not we're going to get rid of the solidify modifier and we going to use something else now I'll do the basics here now and then at the end I will show you complications that might arise but we're just going to do the basics this will work in most cases what we do is we're going to select our model which is called Zin is over here Z 01 and what we're going to do is we're going to select the vertices that we would like to turn into holess if you see what I mean so we're going to edit mode and we'll turn x-ray mode on so that we can make sure that we have access to all of the vertices very easily and we're just going to select the bits that are going to be Hollow we know fingers are a problem so we will take something like this we will just ignore the hands if we select from say here to about say there and then by holding shift I will select along here and then I'm going to use the circle select by pressing C and increasing the size of the circle and just drawing the rest in like that because we have x-ray mode on we'll be selecting the vertices at the back of the body as well you right click to get out of circle mode what we're going to say now is that these areas are the bits we Hollow and these will stay solid now you could put another Circle up here if you wanted but she's got a eyes and a mouth bag in there and I'm not entirely sure whether that's going to work um I would normally take those out first but this will demonstrate the process now what we need to do is we're going to make a Vertex group of these if we go into the little green triangle down here press Plus on the vertex groups we can rename this with one want to I can't be bothered I'm not going to and then we assign the selected vertices that's enough with vertex groups now it's going to seem a little bit odd but don't worry bear with me it's not difficult this is my model Zin 001 and we're going to go into object mode we're going to duplicator with shift and D left Mouse click so that she stays in the same place so now you'll see that there's a Zin one and a Zen 2 I'm going to select Zen one I go into modifiers add a modifier deform displace that doesn't look very good does it but let's just adjust the strength down a little bit the model inside that's Zen 001 as you can see over there in the outliner that's the holess if we look at this now the selected model as in 01 is what's going to be the hollow it's quite thin over here it's quite thin over here and the hand's completely mess of course but here's our magic we created a Vertex group if I select this option here press the vertex group that we created the hands and the feet and our solid I think I'm going to make this a little bit thicker that looks a bit more sensible that's going to be our Hollow so I'm happy with that so we need to apply the displacement okay we're going to go out of x-ray mode at this point now we can turn off our outside model which is in 002 and we have this rather skinny looking model in here if we select it and go into edit mode you'll see that the vertex group is still selected if it wasn't we could go into the vertex group and press select but if I do a control I it will select all the other vertices now remember we're working on the model we have displaced and all the bits that we didn't displace are now selected I'm just going to delete those X vertices and this is going to become the inside of our model but we must do one more thing to it before it can be and that is to select everything go to mesh normals and flip if we turn on face orientation we'll see I deselect everything that she's now red and that means this is the inside of the model and if we turn on zen zen 002 again turn on x-ray mode you can see in there how nice that looks we want to join these two models together we have to be in object mode select in one and in two contrl J we now how R is in 001 what I would do is I will export this model and we'll have a look at it in a slicer so here it is here she is loaded into Chuchu box and I haven't done anything with her but if I move this down you can see she is indeed Hollow except there the hands and the feet so this works so there you go there's just one more thing to consider really and that is if your model has bits and pieces hanging off like this lady has a pouch here and a little wallet thing there and a belt you don't want those really to be displaced so when you're making your selection and your vertex group to decide what is hollow I would seriously advise making sure that they are not selected you don't want them part of your displacement so if you'd like to see what YouTube thinks you want to watch please click on the video in the top right um otherwise click on whatever I think you might be interested in in the bottom left but I hope this video was useful for you I hope it was clear and uh I'll see you in the next one thank you very [Applause] much

Channel: Not Very Good Guy

Views: 3,952

Keywords: 3dprinting 3dprint blender hollow

Id: mAIEIy3kLr4

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2024