How to Use Blender to Render a STL 3d Printer Model

hello this is irv shapiro with the make with tech channel where we learn how to create innovate design and make things using desktop technology 3d printers a little bit of woodworking some software engineering a little bit of electronics now some of the most interesting videos that i've produced were created because i had to solve a particular problem that i was facing today's video was the result of my need to learn how to take stl files the files you use with 3d printers and turn them into beautiful images artistic renderings so i could post them online specifically as many of you may know i've created a software application a website called models.make with tech.com and at modelswithmakewithtech.com we do something very unique you go there and you select a template and the template is for some 3d object then by filling in parameters on the screen you make it your own you create the actual model so one template might be able to create hundreds of variations of models you generate the model in just moments and you download it as an stl file you slice it and you print it now when you post a template which is an open s-cad application a script a program as a creator for other people to share when you post these templates you also want to post a picture with it now sometimes i just take pictures of things i actually 3d printed other times it's nice to have an artistic rendering that really is attractive and to do that the premiere program in the open source world is a program called blender now when you first open blender it's scary i'm going to show you in a minute so i've never really learned it but over the last week or so i took the time to really learn blender and one of the ways i learned it was with some videos from the born cg video channel youtube channel where there are outstanding videos that will teach you a lot of details about blender today though i'm going to simplify everything down and in under a half hour i'm going gonna teach you how to take an stl file loaded into blender and create a beautiful image from it that you can use on a website a blog post a forum or just for the fun of it so stay tuned and let's learn a little bit about blender for 3d printing together [Music] now as the make with tech community expands a bit it now has a user community formed at make with tech.com where thousands of people get together and talk about things they're making 3d objects they're printing even a little bit of electronics it has this youtube channel it has models.makeotech.com it's getting a bit more expensive to run and your views of these videos is a big help so please if you enjoy these videos and you want to see more of them subscribe to the channel click on the bell leave a comment leave a thumbs up and share these videos with everyone you know now let me first define the actual problem so we're going to take a look at models that make with tech.com together and and i'll show you the problem i'm trying to solve if we look here on the screen if i go ahead and click on search make with tech templates these are templates for things that you can manipulate things you can change and i'm going to show you one of the templates i've actually worked on and that's for a bracket for shelves you know those l-shaped brackets are actually shaped like this not like this that you put shelves on well if you want to create one just the exact s shape and size you need for a particular project i created a model to do that a template now if you look at some of the other templates here they're much more beautiful these images than mine which is just a screen capture of a slicer screen so i'm going to take and i'm going to create a more beautiful image for this particular model template to do that i first need an stl file the actual output you would use with 3d printer so i'm going to click on the customizer icon this little 3d box here and you'll see the picture here and then down here you'll see that i can actually take and alter how this template is converted into a 3d printable model i can change the size and the width and the thickness and the screw holes so let's say i want to make this um a bit narrower so i'll make it 20 millimeters wide and i can click on preview here and in just a few seconds you'll see on the screen i have a narrower variation of what's shown there okay so now i'm going to take and generate a real model not just a picture a model that i can 3d print from it i'm going to click on cue and some models take minutes to generate depending on on the complexity of the template this one will actually complete relatively quickly and we can go over here to the results tab and we can see our custom shelf bracket so now i can look at that in 3d and we'll see it right over here i'm going to go ahead and close this and now i'm going to download that stl file so you start with the template you put in your parameters you generate your model you download your stl file and if the designer of the template and anybody can design templates in the open scad language and upload them to models.makewithtech.com if as a designer you have a buy me a coffee tipping account though that's a tipping account for your patrons to sort of say thank you that will show up here um i'm not going to tip myself so i'm all done here now let's verify that this model is ready for 3d printing what's the best way to do that well let's see if we can open it in a slicer so i'm going to go ahead and open up cura and then i'm going to load this model over here and we can see it's ready to be sliced now you can see here exactly how i got that picture i just took a picture of this let's make something more beautiful so let me open a blender here and as soon as this comes up on the screen you'll see why i was intimidated by this program i've been in the computer industry for 35 years i was still intimidated by this program look at all this stuff and even worse if i click on the background here and then i see there's a cube here so there's a camera there's a light and there's a cube and the way blender works is it's as if you're looking through a viewfinder of a camera and you're looking at an object and you're lighting it with different lights to create a beautiful photograph a simulated photograph so i click on this cube and i try to drag it around on the screen nothing happens that's as soon as you do that you get frustrated blender you give it up so i'm going to show you how to use it basically the first thing you need to know is click on an item and then hit the g key the letter g for grab and then do not press any mouse buttons just take and move your mouse and the item will move hit the left mouse button when you're all done so i clicked on the item i hit g for grab and i just moved it around on the screen now if you're going to use this program you really need to have a three button mouse so this is a simple three button mouse i know probably 30 40 bucks online this is a little more complicated three button mouse doesn't matter which kind but you need to have a three button mouse if you take the middle mouse button and you take and you move your mouse while holding it down you can rotate your scene if you take the middle mouse button and you hold shift then you can actually pan your scene now you have to hold shift down before you press the mouse button now when you select an object like this cube here you can go over here to the scale button and then you can take the circle and scale it uniformly or you can take these little handles and scale it in different directions now another way you can move an item besides grab is you can click on the move icon over here and then you can use the arrows to move it on a particular axis now you also can use grab the same way so hit g and then if i hit x it will only move it on the x axis and you can see where x y and z are over here now if i want to look at it from the front view from x i click on x i want to look at it from the side view i click on y i want to look at it from the top i click on z so this will let me look at it from any of those particular views if i want to see what my camera sees i click on the little camera over here or if i have a numeric keypad i press the zero key on that keypad and you'll see here the camera is the object's not really centered in my camera well there's an easy way to fix that i click on my object then i press f3 i type in a line and i'll say align active camera to select it and it will move my object so the view frame of the camera matches it completely now if i want to see what this looks like in high resolution the highest resolution ready to be exported i click on render and i can see what it'll look like in a higher resolution but i also can get close to that if i have a fast enough computer in real time so see these buttons over here this first one just basically does generic shading it doesn't take into account the fact that this scene has a light in it so let me rotate this back around and you can see here the camera is looking from here and there's a light over here now i could click on the light and grab it like any other object and move it closer here but when i move the light around grab it and move it it's not changing how the cube looks because it's just sort of simulated it's designed to be very fast for slow computers if you have a fast enough computer you can click on the globe on the far right here and that will actually show you what your lighting looks like including the environment the world around your object so now if i move this light i can see how it affects the lighting of the object that's going to make it very very easy for me to fine tune how my object looks okay so now we're ready to bring in our stl file now there's a problem here and the problem is see these grid marks they're a full meter because this is like the world so as an example one two three four five six seven this camera is seven meters away from the center of my scene and this light over here is way far away so i'm going to hit g and move this light a little closer i'm going to hit g and move this camera a little closer and now i'm going to import my stl file but a unit in blender is a meter a unit and a slicer is a millimeter so if i have something 140 millimeters in blender it's going to come in as 140 meters that's too big to work with so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take and i'm going to import it and let's find our file here downloads here we go and now immediately see how big it is immediately i'm going to take and scale it so i'm going to click on scale now i want to do this numerically so i can press the n key to get this sidebar i also could go over here to view sidebar and turn that on or off and then i'm going to take the scale and make it much smaller 100 times smaller so 0.01 and i'm going to fill that in for each of these and then i'm going to zoom out and now we can see our camera our light and our object but if i hit the zero key or i hit the camera over here we'll see the object's really small from where the camera is so if i do a f3 and type in a line and select active camera to selective it's going to move the camera in close enough so that when i look at the viewport like looking through the camera it fills up the scene okay so that's sort of nice now i'm going to go up to the top here and instead of looking at my shading once again in just basic shading i'm going to turn on full shading to see how this is going to look and we can see here that it's not exactly what i'm looking for so i have to find this light up here i zoomed out hit g i'm going to move that down closer into our viewport g there we go now i'm going to hit the 0 key and we can see already that looks pretty good but there's only light coming from one direction i want to light up in here also so what i need to do is add another light so i'm going to go to add light and a point light that's like a hanging light bulb and i'm going to grab it i'm going to move it over here so let's rotate this around a little bit let's zoom in let's grab it and let's move it till it lights up in there and it just sort of looks the most interesting so i think right about like that now i'm going to hit the zero key and we can see how this seam will look and we get a pretty good idea but if we want a full resolution look we can click on render render image and that looks pretty good now this is a little too big so let me click on my item again i'm going to click on scale and i'm use this circle here to just make it a little smaller then i'm going to click on g and move it in the middle and that's exactly what i want the scene to look like but how do we make it more interesting well we put a material on it so i'm going to click on the item and when you click on the item this beach ball becomes available now if you look at any of these items like let's say this light bulb and you when you click on an item the second icon here becomes that item so this is a 10 watt bulb and if we look at the other light bulb that's all the way out here that's a thousand white light bulb so let's zoom back in again and let's click on the item and we're going to click on this beach ball and you'll see it's empty because there's no material currently applied to this item so i'm going to click on new i'm going to leave the material surface as principled bsd that's an internal algorithm in blender because that will work for us and let me click and select a color so i can just go here and i can move this around and find a pleasing color for this particular item so that looks pretty good but it's a little too bright so i can bring this down a little bit okay so now we have this lit the way we'd like but we need to put some type of background on it so we're going to click on this icon here that says world properties and we're going to click on color for a background and let's take and play around with what color backgrounds seem to make the most sense here and a little bit of blue is nice and i'm going to increase the brightness just a little bit now you have to be careful here when you increase the brightness it is going to also affect the lighting of your scene so i'm going to make this let's say 0.7 for the strength and now we're going to go ahead and say render this image and there we have it we have a very nice 3d image so i'm going to take image save as i'm going to save it as jpeg so it will be i'm going to save it to my download directory and i'm going to call this shelf image save as image okay now let's go back to the models application and i'm going to go back to my shelf bracket and i'm going to click on the creator tools under create tools creator tools i'm going to say i want to update the model i'm going to delete the old screen image that was there i'm going to go to my downloads directory and place this image in there and i have to make sure i click on add above file to model then i'm going to save or update the shared model i'm going to look at it now and let's look for our bracket and there we go we have our custom shelf bracket now i actually don't like that background i think it's a little bit too dark so we could go back in and make it lighter so we just go back here and let's take and go back to the world and go to background colors and let's lighten that up a little bit let's actually make it a little bit whiter it'll be white so now let's change the intensity of that so it's a light white let's see how that looks if we render it now i think that's a little better look for the preview so all we need to do now is go back to our render window go back to image save as we're going to save it as the same name jpeg save as image now we'll go back in here we'll go to update our model we'll delete this one here we'll click on this here shelf image jpeg open add above file update shared model go back to our search here type in bracket ah much better there you go well folks we learned a little bit about models we learned a little bit about using blender and you can see it's a trial and error kind of process both the steps i gave you it's relatively simple and i hope you enjoyed this video if you did give me a thumbs up share the video you know all the stuff and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 13,776

Keywords: blender, openscad customizer, openscad, 3d printer models, custom 3d printer models, learning blender, rendering stl files, blender for 3d printing, 3d printer, stl, blender tutorial, 3d print, 3d printing for beginners, blender 3d, blender guru, 3d printing ideas, blender 3.0, 3d printing with blender, blender beginner tutorial, how to setup blender, blender 3d printing, 3d printing in blender, getting started with 3d printing, blender 3d print, blender 3d print toolbox

Id: 4yvQa9tULYs

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022