Rendering FreeCAD models in Blender - The Easy Way

[Music] in this video we're going to create something in freecad and then export that as an stl and take that into blender and render it i'll show you how to do all of that i'm not going to focus on the creation of the part i'm just making a part you know something to render and then i'll show you how to to render it in blender in detail okay i'm just going to make something that i can render in blender so i want to make something that's fairly simple but has some features to it so that we can render it and get something that looks decent in blender the point of this video is really to show you how to get it from freecad into blender and how to render it in blender so you got something that looks pretty cool so i'm not gonna do a whole lot of um messing around with this i'm just gonna um make something very quickly and then i'm gonna use that something um i'm gonna use that something just to do the rendering okay there we go finally got that to work so we're gonna close that we'll go to a pad i'm going to pad that i'm going to pet it reversed and i'm going to make it i want it to be about 20 30 mil let's go with 20 i think yeah let's go with 30. i think 30 of a good number and then i'm going to make something that has a web on it i think i think that's cool so let's go ahead and do that create another sketch we'll do it in this plane okay and we're gonna make something you guys like this here so do so so okay so now we have a shape that i think will look reasonable once we um do some stuff with it actually i'm gonna do one more thing here i'm gonna put a chamfer around there and i'm gonna make that shout for a little bit bigger i'm gonna add this surface too okay just to give it a little bit of give it a little bit of feature and so you can see we've already got something made so now let's assume we want to render this in blender we want to make it look cool in blender and for those of you who haven't uh used blender i'll put a link to it in the description so you can download it and you'll see it's another fantastic piece of open source software so all we're going to do is we make sure we have our body selected and we say file and export and we're going to export this as an stl so we picked stl from here so this is stl mesh and i'm going to call it um gizmo dot stl and we'll save that guy and we'll just save this so we can come back to if we wanted to and again this is just something i think will look okay in blender it's not it's not anything that has to be accurate for me but of course you can take any of your stl models anything your 3d printing you can take that model and render it in blender and i'm going to show you how to do that okay so this is blender and for those of you who haven't seen it before it can look a little intimidating but if you just follow my lead here once you start working with blender you'll realize that many of the key presses many of the ways that it does things are the same in each of the workspaces you also notice that for moving things around and manipulating it it's quite easy if you use the planes that you used to in freecad i use blender for my all my videos i i edit my videos in blender which is a little bit uh maybe more complicated than some of the video editors but i do that because i really like blender and i dabble with it i'm not i'm not by any means an expert in blender but i certainly dabble with it and enjoy it so normally i'd hit this video editing and if you look on this side you can see all my prior videos are all showing up here so the last one i did was the multi-color sign video and you can spot the spelling mistake there so in this case i'm going to do a general one so the general one when i select that gives you what they call the default cube and the default cube is just something that you can work with so you can manipulate it the rotations are the same i'm hitting the middle button as you can see so the middle button allows me to scroll around if i press shift in the middle button i can move things left and right and in this particular space i have a couple of things this odd looking thing here that's a camera and that camera is set looking at that cube and over here is a light and that's what's lighting my scene now right now you can't see how my scene would look but if i hit this button over here so there are buttons at the top here that allow you to select different viewport shadings so this one is the rendered view and that's how you see the what the final picture will look like so if i render that the cube's not very exciting um but that's kind of how it looks and if i want to see the final picture i can go over here and i can render the image if i do that basically that is what you get out of blender the default cube right off the bat we're going to do a few things um to make it a little bit more interesting first thing we're going to do is we're going to import our model so i'm going to say file and import and i'm importing an stl because that's what i saved it as so in my stl i need to go find where i saved that guy and i called it gizmo if you remember so i'm going to import that now i've imported my my model and you can see it's quite a bit bigger than the default cube so i can scale it i can make it a different size if i want to um it certainly is is possible uh if i do that i just press s and i can just scale and we're done there so all i did was hit s and then just hold the mouse down move it in to get the saw size that i want now of course if i do a render view i render my image you're gonna see that off the bat the camera is too close i can still see the default cube in there and now this structure on the outside is actually my part so we've got to relocate the camera we got to relocate the light source um and actually i'm going to scale down a little more because i think i'm still too big there that's good and then zoom i can zoom in so you can see the size of that cube compared to to the piece i have here so if i scale that even further i'm just going to scale so we're not so massive compared to the cube and then zoom in and great now i'm going to do is i'm going to take this cube and i'm going to move it and you can see these lines here this green line and this red line the red line is the x-axis you can tell that because if you look up at this little wcs up here you can see z or z is blue you can see y is green and you can see x is red so this is the x-axis so if i want to move something along the x-axis i can move it along that line if i want to move it in the y-axis i can move along that line so i'm going to move this cube and if you watch when i select the cube it selects it on its own and to move is g for grab and then y for the direction that i want to move in and i'll just slide it along and there we have our cube is now next to our piece and i'm gonna take a look at it through the camera view i'm gonna render it so we can take a look at it now see what we have so now if you look we're still close but we can see our part and we can still see a piece of that cube so in blender we have a couple of options with these views so i can look at it just from a modeled view i can look at it in my look dev view this allows me to see the material preview so if i have materials assigned to i'll be able to see them there and then the fully rendered view the downside of using the rendered view all the time is it makes the computer work harder so if you have a slow computer that's going to be really slow to move that around you also have a wireframe view so if i do that now i can see my my model and the stl lines on there so now we know how to move the part around we can also move any of the other objects so we can move the light around like here if you look at on this right hand side it shows you all the parts are actually in this scene so the gizmo the cube the camera and the light are easily selected from over here the light itself i can move that the exact same way i just moved that cube and the camera too then i have one other thing i can do is i can look at it as if i'm looking through the camera by selecting this little camera over here says toggle the camera view and the shortcut is the number pad zero and there inside i can see what we'll see in the camera so remember when we rendered it we could see this part and we could see that this cube was in our scene so to get all of this in we're either gonna have to move the parts away from the camera or move the camera away from the parts so if i toggle back my view to here i can see where my camera is and i can see where my parts are and to change views if you have a number pad uh this top view is seven the camera view is zero and you can work your way through the numbers to get to the different views so what we're going to do is we're going to move up here we're going to select our camera i'm going to select it from over here and we're going to say g for grab and then we're going to say x and we're going to move it along the x plane to about here and then we're gonna have another look in our camera view and we're gonna see that that's still not far enough away so if i want to move it in the x and y position i say g for grab and shift z so you got x y and z that can move in if you do a shift and that um direction x y or z it'll move it in the other two but not that one so i'm gonna do that and then i can move it back here somewhere we're going to take another look in our camera and we're looking good now we can because the camera is still selected i can say g and then zed and you see the blue line is now lit up and then i can move the camera up keep moving up so i get everything in my camera view and i can say g and shift z and just shift that along this way a little bit so i'm just doing the same thing we did from the top view but now i'm doing it in the camera view so i can still move things around till i get it just where i want to see it now if we render it we'll be able to see both parts so let's take a look at that we'll go up here we'll do render image and when you first render it comes up very close on my screen anyway i have to zoom out a little bit by just rolling the mouse wheel and then i can actually see what what got rendered so you can see it has rendered quite nicely this and this in the scene and so i think we're in good shape there and now we're kind of boring that we just got this um we just have this color here and so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna pick a view that i like i'll go with that one so i'm gonna um apply some colors to these pieces and i'll show you how to do that so first things first we're going to select the gizmo i can either click on the gizmo there or click on it up here and then on this area here these are all properties for things so if you look here now gizmo is selected and this is uh the object properties so it's transformed so i could move it from here if i wanted to um there's lots of information on what it's doing there but what i the thing i want to be able to do is i want to go to its material properties which is this little ball thing down here click that you can see it doesn't have any material assigned to it now if i select the cube you'll see it has a material assigned to it the cube by default has this material called material assigned to it so we can give this a base color by selecting the color here and i'm just going to pick it as a light blue color we'll go with that and nothing changed so why didn't anything change it's because we're viewing it in our solid view so if we view it in our material preview now i can see the color that's on there now there is there is a way i if i wanted this color and this color to be exactly the same i can just select this part and then from this drop down list i can select material and now they both have the same material applied to them so that's good if you want them to be the exact same now if i don't want that to be the case i'm gonna get rid of that material from this guy the material still exists and it's still applied to that guy there so now i'm gonna create a new material and when i do that it picks some defaults right away and i'm gonna pick a color i'm going to pick it as a light yellow there we go and now straight away we can look at what does our rendered image look like so now you can see we already have colors um but one thing that's kind of weird is we have some shadow here but there's no shadows down here why is that well in blender these guys are just sitting in space in an infinite space there's no floor so they're not they're not sitting on top of anything so what we need to do is we need to add a floor and to do that we're going to say add a mesh there's going to be a plane you can see the plane dropped in we're going to use that s to scale that plane and we'll just drag that out until we get the plane to be as big as we want it to be and great now we have a floor and one of the things to look at is you see it's in space so so the floor is actually sitting at zero zero but my parts the bottom of my parts are not in zero zero so we've got two options we can move the floor down or to move the parts up so either way it doesn't matter so if i select the gizmo and again g for grab z for the blue direction or the up and down direction and there we have it and then i'll do the same thing for the cube i'm gonna say g and then z and then pick him up here and now we have a floor and if we if we look here we're going to render it now we have shadows onto our floor and of course the floor has an end so there you can see that the floor is actually stopping there so if we wanted to make a wall that came up the back to so put it into a box if you like i'll show you how to do that so if i select this plane and then i hit tab i will go into what's called edit mode you can see it's up here edit mode and all i'm going to do is i'm going to select the mode i want to edit in is this edge mode so this is important because right now it's selecting in face mode but we want to select in edge mode what that means is only going to select an edge so i'm going to select this edge and i'm going to use e for extrude and i'm going to say z because i want to go straight up and i'm just going to make that go up so now we have a back wall then i'm going to select this edge i'm going to say e and z again come straight up we'll come up to about the same and now i have a room so if i hit my tab key again to go back to my object mode i can see i have my room looks like i made one of my walls higher than the other but i don't think it matters if i go here and render it we'll see if you can see that in the rendered image so now you can see my rendered image is in a room and then what we're going to do is we're going to move that camera a little bit because it's in the wrong spot at the moment it's if you look here we're missing the top part because remember we moved everything up so i'm going to select my camera and i'm going to say g and z again we're just going to move our camera up just to bring everything into the middle and perfect and now if i render that now you can see the render is pretty cool we have all the shadows are in there's shadows all throughout and of course now if i look at it in rendered view here and i select the light and i say g and shift z so i'm not moving it up but i'm just moving it around you can see how the shadow moves around i'm just going to take it there and one other thing is if you don't want these sharp edges to show up in the back here there's a way to change that and i'm going to show you that in a minute so if we want to get rid of those harsh edges there we can do is we can select the plane and we can do a thing called add in a modifier so this little spanner or wrench whatever you want to call it is the modifier and i can say add modifier and put a bevel which is kind of like a um chamfer edition in free cad now if i add a bevel what it's going to do is it's going to ask me how many segments do i want to add into that bevel so right now it's just like a chamfer if you look here and if the more segments i add the more like a radius it becomes so if i say let's add let's set a hundred just for grins and giggles and now you can see that's a much softer edge there so if i go into our render render our image and now you can see the edge here is a softer edges more a smoother edge if you like and if we put more segments in there we can literally get that to disappear so um i'm not going to go into too much detail with this because it's up to you to try out some different things put different colors in there try different angles one thing you can do very easily in blender is animation so you can get that to rotate if you notice the adventures in creation opening title for my videos that is done in blender it's a very simple animation if you notice at the end of the videos if you're one of those champions who actually get to the ends of the videos you will notice that i have a flag that flies with adventures in creation on it that was done in blender all the animation the simulation you can actually simulate the wind so i suggest if you're interested in rendering and you're interested in displaying your models in a in a more rendered and lit way with materials that you can add these are just colors but you can actually add materials with texture um i suggest looking into blender and taking a look at that to enhance what you're creating in freecad so one other thing i wanted to show you in freecad to give this a bit more interest um obviously the cube is a bit boring there on his own so if we select the cube and we say shift d we have another cube and we can do the same thing for our gizmo so if we say shift d to duplicate and now i have two gizmos and what i'm able to do i put that gives me down to glue what i'm able to do is create multiple copies of the same thing and we can place them with a little interest i can say for this guy i can say r to rotate around z which is a z axis and i can rotate him around the other way and i can say move him out here perhaps and drop him there and move him down a little bit cuz he's up off the ground and take a quick look how that's gonna look he's a little too close so i'm gonna take that guy and i'm gonna move him into the back a little bit and then i'm gonna take this guy and i'm gonna g for grab shift z so he's only moving in x and y i'll bring him over here into the light i'm going to bring this cube in front and i'm going to say rotate him and i'm going to rotate him in the x direction and then i'll maybe rotate him in the z direction and now start to get a little bit more interest in my scene and i'm going to move my camera up a little bit so i'm going to select the camera over here just move it up and i think we'll swing it to the left so we'll move that this way a little bit something like that and just for a little bit of interest so now i can see both sides of my model i've got some nice shadow going on i'm gonna render that and of course if that's the one you like and you want to save it you can say image and you can say save as and i'm going to save it in my free cad folder under pictures i'm just going to call it rendered gizmo and save image and now that image is saved so it's that easy to make something with a little bit of interest that looks cool uh has your model has multiple sides of your model so you can see different aspects of it a great visualization tool if you're trying to design something you want to show someone what it looks like this gives you a great opportunity to create something where you can share multiple aspects of it and as i said if you wanted to you could actually animate it moving around very easily maybe we'll do that in another video so if you've enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up and of course subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already if you're interested in seeing more blender stuff leave a comment below and i'll add some more stuff i can show you how to add materials and things and textures to the parts and things like that maybe they'll be interesting to do so i hope you've enjoyed this video a little bit different from the usual ones but i thought it was fun and i thought it was something you would enjoy seeing thanks

Channel: Adventures in creation

Views: 10,525

Keywords: FreeCAD, CNC, CAD, CAM, CNC routing, Design, DIY, woodworking, 3D printing, maker, creativity, art, crafts

Id: DEZDBw51oUQ

Length: 34min 34sec (2074 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021