How to Position Parts for 3D Printing - Helmets

[Music] hey guys what's up welcome to my channel my name is disembodied head floating on your computer screen this is a little bit of a different video it's going to be more of a walk through on how i do things and this is how i arrange and slice up helmets to fit my print bed this isn't a settings tutorial this isn't a look at all these cool cura settings and adjust all this this that's a video for another time i'll be doing that separately this is how i go through cura and i use another program called slicer to kind of cut up and break up the parts to fit them on my printer now if this works for you great follow along emulate it if it doesn't sorry keep learning it'd be nice if we all had a printer like this just a big old print bed that we can just you know pump out any part we want but realistically you probably have a printer like an artillery x1 or cr-10s that's going to give you a 300 by 300 by 400 print bed and yeah you could probably print a helmet one shot in this i wouldn't recommend it though um it's just asking for trouble but you could definitely get away with it again i really wouldn't recommend it or you have something like an ender 3 and a net 8 and that's probably a more realistic size to the more common printer that's out there it's going to be very difficult to get a whole helmet to fit on here what i want to show you guys is first how to cut this up into different parts using another program and then how you can orient those parts and what i look out for when i'm actually arranging a face plate a dome or a jaw or just really any part in general i'll be focusing mostly on helmets for this tutorial and i'm going to do another one later on that's more focused on bigger armor parts and much larger pieces and how to cut them and orient them for this i'm going to be using the free thingyverse mark 85 version one helmet i absolutely love this helmet um it just it's beautiful it fits together so nicely when it's printed it looks great and if you just want a good test helmet that'll just look great on your shelf this is definitely uh this is definitely a go-to it's and it's one of the easier iron man helmets to print if you've ever downloaded an stl from thingiverse or got it from your colts 3d or something usually it comes in multiple parts here you can see it there's the head there's the jaw the lower lip the main a face plate uh the flap in the full helmet i've gotten a couple files before though where if the helmet is just one piece and you need to cut it up all by yourself so if you download this cool program called slicer it has a really cool feature in it and all you got to do is go over drop the whole file in and this will only work if the file was made this way it doesn't work for everything so i apologize if this actually doesn't work for you but what you're going to do is you're going to click and you're going to actually hit this feature up here called split and it's going to break apart the model if it can be broken apart this was designed as multiple parts it was temporarily you could say glued together in a 3d space to give it this shape but what you're doing by splitting it is then just breaking it back into those shapes now you can orient them and print them in different parts so to get these out of slicer and be able to print them in cura you're going to need to export them into an stl form like they were just separately so if i just want to keep the face plate i'm going to go ahead and just delete everything else and now i can go down here over here and hit export stl put them somewhere where you can get them full faceplate so now just this faceplate is saved over in my downloads and there's the face plate from the file we just cut up all ready to go and honestly it already fits on an ender but we're going to talk about orientation in a minute so that's the faceplate and all you got to do is undo the delete now i can delete the faceplate export the jaw go back delete these export the lip and just rinse and repeat until you have each file separated and split into different pieces so we have the face plate ready to go now if you've been messing around with cure for a little bit and you've done some test prints you've probably kind of messed with the settings over here but i want to do something real quick and show you guys real fast why i would never print a face plate or really any part in general flat i always try to stand my parts up as tall as possible and real quick i want to show you guys why so we're going to put on a kind of a higher quality setting we're going to do a infill of about 10 percent we're going to put support and adhesion on and i'll talk about exactly what all these are when we get into our preview look at that two and a half days and a third of a roll of filament for just a face plate that's a little ridiculous isn't it always inspect your prints before you send them so what's cool is go into the little preview up here and if your preview doesn't automatically have color on it go over here to this little check box and it might be on material color so you're going to want to do is switch it over to line type and if you pay attention to what all the colors are they're going to tell you what everything is happening on the print so red is your shell that's actually the solid part of the print so we're going to get rid of that all this yellow orange right here all the orange is your infill that's a lot of infill but we're going to get rid of that too now all you're left with is your support material look how much material is wasted just in supporting this face plate and if you hover down here on this little eye it's going to tell you how much time is spent on each thing and if you look at support 41 24 hours a literal whole day is spent just for support that is ridiculous that's almost half the material i would never send a print like this this is just a colossal waste of time and also if we look at one more thing we if we put the shell back on look at the top of this faceplate right here now if we follow the color code yellow is your top and bottom so this yellow is going to be the top flat part of your print that means this dead center of this front the front of your face mask is going to be this perfectly flat little surface and that's going to take some work to kind of sand down and smooth out it's just going to look weird but you can do even one more if you go all the way over here you can see a little scroll bar that says 856 this print is 856 layers tall and if you start to drag this if you start to drag this down it'll actually show you the model building in real time so you can go through and see exactly each layer you can see what the first layer is going to look like and that's all just adhesion that's a raft and you'll see it build up the supports look how much support is already built and almost none of the face mask is done this is just this is just such a waste and as you get to that very top it's going to start flattening out and it's just not going to be the strongest print it's going to be weird it's going to leave some marks i this is just this is just all sorts of bad so what we're going to do is we're going back and we're going to mess with orientation so let's go back and i want to give this the best possible chance of looking as good as possible right off the bed so let's just stand this up and without adjusting anything else without adjusting quality speed infill let's slice that again one day nine hours almost 24 hours less and let's hover over this again now our supports only account for 16 instead of the 41 percent it was previously they're gonna take five hours as opposed to that 24 hour before and it's only use 178 grams of filament instead of that what 300 and something it was before that is way better so let's go to preview and take a look at this thing that looks a little bit better now it needs to support the eyes and if we go in the back we can see it's supporting a little bit on the side right here kind of weird how it's supporting one side but not the other we're going to talk about that in a second and why it did that it's supporting the eyes it's supporting down here just because this is an odd shape which is fine it has a nice wrap to it to help with the adhesion i always print with a raft i always use bed adhesion it gives your print just a better chance when you're printing armor and helmets you don't need to worry about this perfectly smooth glass bottom you want your print to survive you need that print to come out and typically the very base layer of your print is more than likely going to be support anyway so who cares if it's this nice glossy glass finish use adhesion give your print the best possible chance of surviving so if we actually go and now look at this as it builds up it's a taller print but it's using way less material it's building up it's building up this looks great this is exactly how i orient my face plates now you can get a little more creative with it if you want and you can angle it more you can angle it less slice it you can play with this number all day and get to the minimal amount of filament you're going to waste but don't sacrifice this time in filament too much because you want to look at the print and think all right this looks like it'll survive if i tilt this print so far forward that it might fall over you got to kind of pick a balance here but let's go look at this why did this do that so unfortunately cure is not perfect sometimes it looks and detects for angles that it just can't really figure out it thinks that it's going to need to support this face mask right here so if you get one of these little weird you know tall towers that has a cut in it like this you can either do two things you can reorient the print tilt it forward more tilt it back more or you can come back get a support blocker over here and you're actually just going to throw a support blocker right over here and you're gonna block out that whole area and hit slice again cura wants to put a support there it feels that the angle won't make it but if you get those weird little incredibly tall skinny towers it's because kira's having a hard time differentiating between yes i want to support there no i don't typically if those pop up you're not going to need to support in that little area your printer should be fine in that worst case you have just a little bit of droop that you can sand down anyway look at that and i can't even begin to tell you how happy i am that this just glitched what's this green thing on the ground right here this i couldn't have planned that better if i tried so what is this cure glitched sometimes your g-code glitches and this is fine this can happen this is why again you always want to inspect your print and look at your preview in your g-code look at this line right here there is literally a cut taken out of the print because the g-code just had a little error and i've literally only seen this happen maybe three or four times and i can't believe i just caught it on camera so if we go through and we start to print this what's gonna happen so watch we're building we're building between layer 795 it wants to make layer 796 on the bed so what do you think is going to happen when it tries to lower the nozzle all the way down to the bed to print that layer it's going to destroy your print because it glitched all you have to do is back out change one thing you don't even need to you really don't need to click anything you could hit reload all models it reloads the model and slice it again hey that's a little bit better it's gone so let's build this back up and make sure it's not there again and we build the whole print up and it's gone like i said guys i've actually only ever seen that happen a couple times but it can happen if you've ever had a print just randomly fail it could be your g-code you got to remember that the computer is trying to figure out every single layer and where in position it needs to go computers make mistakes too and there's nothing wrong with that so this is a good print i would save this to the file and let that i would print this so let's go and orient a different print like the jaw so the jaw can be a little tricky depending on what file you got the thingiverse one is a very short stubby jaw on some other files like the do3d or the cg trader the jaw piece is attached to almost the ear cover so it makes it a little bit longer but let's see if we can lay this down the jaw is just a little bit too long so what can we do here hmm well in this case what i would do is i would probably angle it up just a little bit just like that and that's still pretty close and if you want to tweak with it you can actually undo snap rotation so it won't do direct angles each time and you can rotate it just a little bit slower and get it just to fit in the print but that's perfect so that's actually not bad at all and what it's going to want to do is support back here it's going to support all under here so that's not a bad jaw orientation i'd be okay with that and printing it in one piece is pretty nice so we're gonna slice that 22 hours 110 grams okay so let's take a look at this so it's going to support the back of the jar here that's not too bad that seems like a pretty practical angle it's supporting everything here and again we got these weird little supports that kind of pop up now these ones aren't too bad you could probably leave them i wouldn't i'd still throw a support actually if you look at this one closely it's actually not even supporting anything it just kind of stops i thought it's trying to support something up here i shouldn't have picked red huh but it just kind of stops so i would actually throw a support blocker up here and get rid of this whole section and i'd probably do something similar to this one right here again see they're not touching they're not colliding with anything they're not needed cura is having a hard time actually figuring out just how to get the support all the way up there so i would just block those out same right there i think it did it on both sides so i'm going to go through and actually block those real fast so there we go i went through i blocked those out and again make sure you build the whole thing up just to make sure now but now we don't have those weird little uh protrusions trying to be built and come out of nowhere so if i had an ender i was gonna print this jaw on it this this i'd be okay with this i'd be all right it's a one-shot draw but now say you have a file where the jaw just isn't it's too big and it doesn't fit you can still orient and mess around with it you can stand it up more like this i think i've printed a jaw actually what i did is i tried to get the front as flat as possible i think kind of like that yeah i want to say i printed it something like that and that actually came out pretty good too so let's see what this would require look at that now we're at 16 hours with even less filament so let's see what this is going to look like huh i don't think i've ever actually printed a jaw that looked like that but honestly i think i'd send that it looks like it has a good amount of adhesion these supports are going to actually be pretty thick they're not that paper thin weird one that was popping up and it's going to print the whole thing in a v i think i'll be okay sending that honestly and it uses less filament it's going to come out quicker now say the jaw is just too long to even do this it comes all the way up here when i show you guys how to orient the helmet the dome piece it'll make more sense on tricks you can use to make the jaw smaller and cut it up so let's go get that main piece all right so this is a main dome piece to a helmet now it can be bigger or smaller than this depending on what you're printing this is again 100 i actually print this particular helmet for my head and 96 so i could actually print this on the ender just fine but i'm gonna have some weird supports up here is there a way i could orient this to where i could get rid of so see as i rotate and orient it i can actually see the support area fading away so i can rotate this far enough back nope let's see can i move this in just a little bit more look at that so now my helmet up here won't use any support and the only support is going to be on the bottom base i'm pretty comfortable with that right how it is but again this is 96 percent you want your helmet at 100 or you want it you know maybe you have a gigantic head like me and you want 110 depending on what you have this really isn't going to fit this is going to be way too difficult to print it's a long print which makes it risky and you don't want your print failing so how am i going to cut this up so we're going to go back into slicer and we're going to play with another feature so let's get the main dome piece back there it is so we're going to delete that delete that delete that and then we're going to so we want to cut this up now you could cut this up in a couple different ways but all i'm going to do is i'm going to click the print hit cut and it's going to give me this cool preview window first thing i'm going to want to do though is get rid of show preview because i want to be able to see the whole model and it'll also let your computer run a little faster now you could cut this in a couple different ways you could cut it along the z-axis like this you can cut it in the x-axis like this just make sure you actually are paying attention is it dead center you can move this cursor around to kind of orient it and if you are having trouble finding out what dead center of the print is max this bar out this print is basically 200 millimeters wide so dead center is going to be 100 millimeters and that's right there on the axis so i was to cut that it would slice this right in half and the benefit of cutting something perfectly symmetrical like this is if i hit cut it's going to cut both of these in half and you can pick each side do you want to keep the left side or the right side and if you keep the one side it's just a mirror of the other so you can kind of use that to play with how you're going to save the files and you can actually end up saving less files but i don't want to cut it in half like that i want to cut it in half on the z let's see what's the best place to cut this now you can cut it directly in half you know square perfectly but i'll always pay attention to where all my details are when i because i'm gonna have to fuse this back together so where is gonna be the best place i don't wanna go through an edge like that i honestly wanna go through something like this so let's see what 115 guessing oh that's right there that's pretty much exactly where i want it to be and it's going to give me a good cut right through the center and fusing it together is probably not going to be that hard it doesn't go through too many crazy details again you can play with this all you want but what we're going to do is we're going to cut it again but make sure you keep both parts it's going to split it up again just like this split feature did except this time we made a hard solid cut right through it's called a plain cut now we have two parts that we can go ahead and put on our ender to print now again you could go even crazier with this you can cut this back down piece in half again you could cut this front piece in half again however small you need to make it this is just a basis to show you guys how to use this so again we're going to go ahead and delete that export the front front dome undo it delete that rear dome to downloads okay so those are exported and cut so let's drop the front one in look at that automatically it fits perfectly on the bed i i don't really need to do much now this is where again you need to decide are you happy with this and anytime i make a plane cut it's going to make a perfectly flat surface this is going to be your best possible chance for adhesion so i'll try to orient it on that plane cut but you can see up here this widow's peak now is going to need a little bit of support so you kind of have to figure all right so i have a perfectly flat plane cut what you could probably do is go ahead and you could rotate this back let's see let's rotate it until it's gone and then we can move this around so we'll center this move this up move this back so we can fit this on the bed just like this but now instead of supporting that we need to support all of this so you have to what i would do is i would slice this and compare both so this print is going to take one day six hours and 168 grams and supports are going to be 13 of it four hours so 168 and 1.6 days so let's go back let's move this again we're going to rotate it flat so actually we could probably just control s control z this there we go i'll slice it again there's no harm in bouncing around and orienting and practicing and seeing what's going to work and what won't work i highly encourage you it can really save you a lot of headache one day six hours 168. one day six hours 171. so almost let's see 17 five hours to four hours there's really almost no difference in the time it's going to take to do this so if again we're trying to think of the best possible chances for this print to survive it's not putting a bunch of supports all around here now it just needs to make one nice beefy support right in the center i would this is the print i would send i would pick this one over the other but again you could cut more off to get rid of the supports completely and that's however you want to do this so let's get rid of this one and look at the back dome piece and see how that's going to look carrick probably couldn't have aligned that any better but it's going to need some supports and a weird spot back here and i try to always avoid supports that go into details so what i might do in this case is actually just rotate it look at it like this and i'll rotate it until it doesn't the supports no longer touch this spot back here and then we can move it forward right about there all right let's see what this gets us two two and a half days and 259 grams a little bit of a longer print but for an ender this is actually a pretty big piece so if there was going to be something that was going to use a lot of material it was going to be this part of the print let's see why it's taking so long though oh that's using a lot of supports on the outside i don't know if i like all that that's going to be a real pain to remove from here so let's play around with this and what would it be like if we actually just put it on its flat piece just like this so we want to get this as flat as possible so look through there and make sure it's flat that looks pretty flat to me oh that's going to use a lot of support back there so in this case i probably wouldn't even print this one i would give this one more cut along this red line break into the two parts and orient it in a different way this is a little bit of a problem that starts to show its face when you have a smaller printer like an ender when you're trying to print these obscure shaped objects and messing around with armor and stuff it's a tiny printer so you're going to be a little limited now i'm not going to go too much into it but there is a way to adjust just how much support you're going to need in a print and that's in a more advanced custom settings that i don't really want to mess with right now that'll be for another video and if you don't understand that yet we'll get to it in another point but now say real quick say you don't need to cut the main dome piece say you have an artillery sidewinder or a cr10s or a 10s variant and you can actually print that entire main dome in one shot how would you how would you orient it so this is what i can do on my printers and this is the cr-10s and s-pro and v2 and they're becoming much more popular and readily available or at least that build volume is the ender 5 has a pretty big build volume so you could rotate this like this and print a perfectly nice flat top but again if you look in there that's a lot of support so let's render this one day 16 hours and over half a roll of filament that is a lot of support for this helmet and i'm pretty sure that's more so 35 is just support and let's get rid of the shell and the infill look at all that support that is a gigantic dome i don't i don't even know what you'd do with that you probably boost up a better couch with that so when i printed dome i will always flip it upside down like a bowl i it doesn't matter what it is the sacrifice that i'm going to trade off here is instead of wasting so much material on support and having to remove all these crazy supports from the inside all i have to do is break them off the top and i can smooth and sand it down that's the cool thing about these iron man helmets is typically they're smooth they want to be smooth so if you have to fill them in with some wood filler in the end it's really not the end of the world so i'll always try to orient it as flat as possible as a bowl so something like that and let's slice again what was it one day a little over a day and 600 grams so one day one hour we shaved a couple hours off but we cut our material cost in half look how much less supports this is going to need and you can actually already see since we're in this kind of x-ray mode again it's doing some of these weird little support structures right here and again if you start messing with your your support overhang angles and the advanced settings you can actually get rid of these all together but i would go ahead and block these out but let's look at what the whole print looks like now look at all that infill we're going to talk about that in another video i like that i'm comfortable with that print and this is exactly how i print this exact helmet i just block out these little weird supports in here you can actually see them in here i'd probably leave these these will break out pretty easily but these weird ones that didn't quite connect i would just go ahead and block them right out and i would send this and if i if my memory serves correctly we're looking at about 380 grams 100 grams and maybe i want to say 200 and something or 180 grams for the face plate so we're about half to three quarters of a roll of filament for an entire helmet including supports that's amazing all i want to stress is is less always more or is more always less like just because you can slice something a certain way and render g code a certain way doesn't mean you should you need to think about orientation this is a trial and error i go through on every single one of my projects in prints i look at them i slice them i've spent hours adjusting a face plate tilting a little more forward and a little more forward and a little more forward rendering it and looking at the supports and just trying to find that perfect angle that i knew would survive and use the least amount of material there is no perfect answer to all this there is no this is the 100 way to do this i wish there was but it's just not the case i really hope this video helped you guys kind of better understand what i'm looking for when i orient my prints and again this isn't a settings tutorial that's going to be a tutorial that i'll probably post pretty quickly after this just going over things i adjust in the custom settings and my profiles that everybody keeps asking for i don't really adjust anything beyond stock so i really hope this helped you if you guys have any more questions drop comments message me on instagram do whatever i want to help you guys better understand this on orienting your prints and again getting the best possible prints with the best possible chances of survival this is 3d printing is an art there is just not a perfect way to do it you have to experiment you're going to have failures but it's you need to remember and learn why those failures happened if you guys did enjoy this video if it did help you and you actually did learn something from it and by chance you haven't subscribed already please do it would help me out a lot and i just i appreciate it and i want to keep giving you guys these videos and teaching you and showing you everything i've learned through all of this so again thank you for watching i hope you learned something and have a good day [Music] you

Channel: Frankly Built

Views: 9,106

Rating: 4.9523811 out of 5

Keywords: iron man, ironman, marvel, 3d, 3dprinting, 3d printing, 3d printed, diy, at home, cosplay, props, replica, mark50, mark85, mark 50, mark 85, suit, iron man suit, creality, cr-10s, cr-10, ultimaker, cura, creawesome, helmet, tony stark, comicon, comic-con, leds, painting, sanding, armor, armour, update, maker space, mcu, endgame, 3d model, d03d, budget, Helmet, position, arrange, slic3r, slicer, prusa, orient, angle

Id: uUkKQ804it0

Length: 27min 18sec (1638 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020