zBrush 3D Printing Pt. 1 - Preparing your model

hello Michael here with something a little bit different this week um today I'm going to be looking at 3D printing from zbrush um it's something that I've recently gotten into and it's a little bit tricky uh when you're first getting into it because there's a few things that you need to keep in mind uh when you're prepping your model so um I'm going to take you through how to bring your model from zbrush uh into your slicer uh I'm going to be using the MakerBot desktop slicer um because that works well with my 3D printer um you could possibly use it with with your 3D printer it depends on what printer you're using um otherwise you're going to have to use a different slicer um but this particular tutorial um works well if you're using the same uh 3D printer as me which is a flash Forge Creator Pro but if you're using any other 3D printer you can still use this tutorial to prepare your model for print uh and then put it over to a slicing program or even uh for some websites like shapeways this would be appropriate as well so as you can see I've got a pretty basic model here um one of my characters uh which is typical of me to have a big ridiculous tongue um and a dumb face it's how I like to design them the Dumber looking the better um so you'll see here on the right that I've already got a ton of subtools uh which are basically all the different bits of him um all separated and I'm going to want to com B those into one shell um otherwise the print um when you print it it's going to like for instance this leg um you can see it's intersecting the body there it'll actually print the sphere inside the body as well which is a waste of time for starters uh for the print and it's also a waste of material um so to speed that up you just want to have the one shell um if you're just using a regular plastic like pla ABS printer uh for Extrusion you probably don't need to put a port hole on the bottom uh I see some people like to and I've done it um with some of my prints and uh it is a good way to save uh material and speed up the process as well because if you've got them just sitting on a a desk or something like that they're not designed as a toy um that's going to be moved around then having a big hole in the bottom doesn't really matter cuz no one's going to see it but um if it's going to be a toy for someone uh then it's probably a better idea just to keep it as a closed shell so um how do we get this to be a closed shell well the first thing we're going to do is we're going to um merge all sub tools um you'll see I've got oh I can I can how do you do it d uh I can put smooth uh uh what's it called [Music] um Dynamic uh subdivision on um I'm keeping it off for now if you're are you trying to get like a smooth low poly model like this one um you want to be working with um Dynamic subdivision but before you merge it doesn't really matter if it's on or off um just don't apply it keep it at its lowest subdivision met uh level because we're going to apply the dynamic subdivision uh once all these parts are merged that just saves a little bit of time so let's do that um let's go merge merge visible and it creates a new tool um up the top here and which is this one so you can see um for some reason they're a different color let's quickly make them all the same color there we go um so it is one object but um if I hide part of the model you'll see that that sphere is intersecting the um body there and you don't want that so what we're going to do is we're going to dynamesh this all together um this is one method you could also obviously go through U and make cuts and then um Bridge gaps uh that that's obviously going to give you a little bit titer result U depending on what size model you're going to print uh that might be a bit way to go uh but for doing this one I'm just going to use dynames U it's a lot quicker especially if you're prototyping uh like one thing I found that when I printed this model earlier is that his toes were too little and they sort of didn't like print up well so I wanted to make them a bit bigger so this is really good for rapid prototyping and it's good for your projects to be able to go back between this and be like make adjustments to the feed or whatever and then and then merge it and then you've got another tool so I've got one here previous that you can see um but I'll quickly show you how to do the dynames so um with dynames I'm sure you've used it before well actually first thing you want to do turn on Dynamic subdivision you'll see everything gets smooth and then you want to apply it and delete lower because we're going to um dynamesh it and it'll just prompt you anyway but doesn't really matter so um first level dynamesh 128 obviously you can see that's not going to be good enough it's too low res that the toeses start getting dumb so let's back out of that uh let's double it 256 and try again uh that's closer but probably not good enough I'm going to back that one out and go up to 350 odd 352 um our Target here polygon wise is to keep it under a million Poes and you'll see I've got um active Poes up the top there um so all these tools uh with the smooth with the dynamic subdivision applied has brought it to 940,000 poies um so Dynam ising it will bring it down a touch depending on what level we do it at so this is 352 and um that's pretty good um obviously the thing that you want to look out for when you Dam m is um the joins they get a little bit Pocky um and so probably what you're going to want to do after you do a Dynam is is just go through smooth out all the joins um just by um I'm just going to put uh whatam call it on um mirroring you just go through I'm not on myti so I can't do this very well with the mouse but just go through and smooth it out try to keep your um defined detail obviously um as you're doing it so don't overdo it like the toes and things would be an area where if just go a bit too high they're just going to melt together um but yeah that's pretty self-explanatory so um I'll um skip to the next part because you don't really need to see me smoothing out this whole model um that's pretty straightforward to do yourself um so the next part um you want to grab your Z plugin I'm just going to dock it on the right here um and we're going to go to 3D print exporter you don't have to worry about UVS and any that junk um I'm going to change it to millimeters um because I live in Australia and we are on the metric system um whenever you change any of these values I'll change that to 50 I going to change all of them uh as though it's a square it's not actually measuring the length and the width and the depth uh to give you an accurate value between those so uh it's a good idea to just figure out like roughly how tall you want your model to be it's your x value uh I'm going to say I want this to be 35 mil tall uh so it's going to be the one I change and then we're going to export that as an STL by clicking on this guy here um and then I'm going to Chuck it in here and I'm going to call it CH bunny 3D print CH all right and that is the first part complete and now we're going to move over into uh make a bot desktop and I'm going to show you how to prep the model for printing

Channel: Small Robot Studio

Views: 37,717

Keywords: zbrush, 3d printing, makerbot desktop, flash forge, creator pro, tutorial

Id: 5NlsLqBLdF4

Length: 8min 14sec (494 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 23 2016