Learn Print-In-Place 3D Printing

[Music] hey guys today we're going to try something a little bit different my wife and i just moved back to the midwest uh just in time for fall as you can see these beautiful leaves blown in the wind and that inspired a project idea i'd like to walk you through the process of making your own print in place articulated leaf i'm going to do three different models so the inspiration for this idea was a really popular model that you've probably already heard of it's called flexi rex it's a print in place dinosaur skeleton and it's really cool it kind of looks like each little segment is a vertebrae and that makes it so that you can kind of articulate his body make him wag his tail or sit in different positions that kind of thing this was the inspiration for the project along with the fall leaves so let's just jump right in and talk about how to make your own print in place the first step is to pick an svg of the item that you would like to make articulate in my case i'm going to use a maple leaf you can make an svg online from a png or a jpeg you just have to convert it then you can actually insert that svg into fusion 360 as you can see the first step after you have your svg in fusion 360 is to edit that sketch you got to make sure that it is a closed loop so that you'll be able to extrude it and make sure that it's the right geometry you want you can see here i am adjusting the stem it looked like it was going to print a little bit too thin would likely either not print well or break off so i am making the stem a little bit bigger just using the three-point arc tool to make a natural looking stem [Music] it's a creative process so maybe this isn't the best stem but it should work for our purposes okay i've got my stem now i'm just gonna trim away the extra bits of line that we don't need now you can see there's my maple leaf so i finished the sketch the next thing i'm going to do is extrude it just to give it a little bit of depth we're going to end up adjusting this later so it doesn't really matter at this step there you go i have one very thick maple leaf my next step is to measure the height when you insert an svg the way i did it may not be exactly the size you want so in this case i've got 68 millimeters tall and what i'm going to do is actually scale this whole body down up sorry i want it to be a hundred millimeters tall so i'm going to take the body and i'm going to scale it by the ratio 100 over 68 point whatever that decimal was so now my part should be exactly 100 millimeters tall and i can measure it again to be sure 99.999 is close enough for me so the next thing i want to do is make it the appropriate thickness when i scaled it it adjusted the thickness because i did uniform so what i'm actually going to do is pick the back surface and i'm going to do an offset extrusion so i'm going offset eight millimeters that's basically going to preserve the portion of the part that i want to keep and then i'm just gonna drag my slider and extrude in cut mode everything else so all i have left is that first eight millimeters that i preserved with the offset and there you go i've got my part that's a hundred millimeters tall and eight millimeters thick the next step is to sketch on the surface what i need is a bunch of horizontal lines basically to cut this part up into the segments that i want to use my line tool is fighting me right now i typically just make all of my lines horizontal but what's important is that you have an even number of lines and that they're all parallel to each other so as you're doing this you want to also make sure that you're making it articulate at points that make sense maybe between these little serrations in the leaf or if you're doing a different kind of model just pay attention that these lines we're drawing will define the point at which the part will articulate the joint all right now that i've got all my lines drawn the spacing i want between each set is one millimeter uh you're welcome to just copy these dimensions i found them by trial and error but for my purposes and you may find success with this too a millimeter gap between them works really well that'll change based on the printer and some other factors but that's a good starting point this next part is basically uh primarily preference how big you want the individual segments to be but it's important to note that your segments shouldn't be any less than maybe 12 or so millimeters tall otherwise there's not going to be room for the actual joint that we're going to draw in later so i'm going with 20 right now just to kind of see how things space out i can already tell that that top piece is going to be too small so what i'm going to do is just make them all a bit taller to push that piece up even further and i'm just gonna settle with having four segments on this one yeah that looks good so i'm just gonna remove this top bit and then i'm going to go through and cut away all the lines that i don't need i'm lazy so i drew my lines bigger than the part knowing that i would just trim off the slack later technically you don't even have to do that you could leave those extra lines in the sketch and it wouldn't hurt anything but for ease of editing later i like to clean up my sketches so that i can jump back into them and everything makes sense so i'm going to trim all of these lines that pass the part [Music] perfect we're just using the trim tool here again it's a little pair of scissors all right so that sketch is done the next step is actually to select those little gaps that we just created and we're going to use an extrusion to cut our part into four pieces so i grab my extrude tool i make sure i'm extruding backwards into the part and then it's going to cut i cut all the way through so now i have my four individual segments um cosmetic reasons i'm deciding to make this top piece a little bit taller i think that looks better good all right our next step uh is to draw in the first part of the joint um i think of this as kind of a knuckle and pin joint i'm sure there's a better name for it but we're actually drawing the knuckle and it'll make more and more sense as we progress but these dimensions six millimeters wide eight millimeters tall and using an offset of a half a millimeter seems to work really well so you're welcome to just steal that found again by trial and error so we make our portrait and we cut it out the goal here is to create the piece that then can be connected to the bottom joint so when we look at this from the top i'm calling that rectangular little offshoot a knuckle i'm just gonna speed through these other joints real quick so now i have all three of my knuckles and you can see each each segment has a knuckle on the top and uh sort of a hole on the bottom of the next piece so that they will all fit together this is just the first step renaming the bodies because when i cut it up the way i do they get kind of jumbled around so i'm putting them in a more logical order just so it's easier for me to navigate abcd top to bottom great so i want to turn off my top segment so that i can see this top knuckle here and i'm going to sketch on the side what i'm actually doing here is creating uh the hinge so on the knuckle from the side we want just a round hinge joint you can use these measurements as well since my part is eight millimeters thick i want my first circle to be a radius of four the second can be a diameter of 4.5 and the middle one is three and you'll see in just a second here what that looks like i'm going to cut away everything and now i have a nice little hinge joint that middle circle is useful because that's gonna become our pin so i'm going to grab that middle circle and then i'm actually going to extrude on both sides and just make sure that it overlaps that top segment and i'm going to join so what this actually does is gives me the pin that goes through that knuckle so i'm gonna fast forward through this last bit i'm just repeating those save moves again uh the bigger circle is eight millimeters the smaller is 4.5 and then the pin is three so that is all of my joints now what i like to do also is to put a little fill it where the pin meets the body of the segment this is going to make the print in place functionality better more likely that your print will succeed on the first time it basically helps to bridge that little gap when the pin first starts printing and you'll see that more clear when we look at it in the slicer so there it is there's my leaf i have three joints four segments it looks more and more canadian the longer i look at it and that is great so this is my maple leaf i have three other models they're all going to be available on thingiverse so be a link in the description so the next step is to select the whole thing we don't want to make a copy we want to save it as a mesh i'm going to change the type to stl because that's what my printer likes and i'm going to save this somewhere i can find it okay you can see the other two i've got a birch and an oak leaf already ready so now i'm going to open up my slicer i use the creality slicer just because that's what came with my printer i use the cr-10 so i'm going to grab the stl for the part i just made that's the maple leaf v1 [Music] and i'll give you an up close view here after it's done slicing of how that joint actually prints in place so we zoom in real close here all right so you can see here the knuckle is going to open up and have a cavity just big enough for the pin to come through and the reason we did that little fillet is because it helps the pin bridge the gap across the knuckle if that makes sense so now that we have our g-code we're going to save that off in the same folder and we can jump ahead and show you some print video [Music] hey google turn on the printer [Music] [Applause] you can thank my wife for helping me set up the raspberry pi with the octopi so that i can control it remotely and so that i can make really cool time lapses of my prints [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so this is our first this is the birch leaf we did that in a nice golden yellow color from matter hackers this one here is also from mata hackers it's their dark green color that's the oak leaf and then we have our maple leaf this is inland red alright guys thanks for watching hope you enjoyed the tutorial if you have any questions leave it in the comments and i will do my best to answer them if you have anything else you'd like to see me model or any other project ideas just let me know i'm always looking for new ideas thanks for watching and have a great day [Music] you

Channel: FLA Labs

Views: 1,656

Keywords: Print in place, 3d printing, leaves, fall, tutorial, fusion360, Creality, CR10, Inland, Matter Hackers, DIY, Build Video

Id: gjUP2e8zNKI

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021