I wonder, anyone in here ever use blender for 3d printing?
Most of people i know praise fusion 360, i use it my self, but for a few days i been having bad internet conecction and i cant log into fusion, thats why i wonder if blender can be use as a backup program for 3d printing, i know its heavily use for cinematics and such, but never saw anyone used it for printing. Anyone??
I used Neither, I’ve only used 123D Autodesk
Which is free, but limited but great for beginner’s, and it’s free to down load.
I use a solidworks seat that came with my EAA membership.
It is popular among people who already know blender, popular enough that there is now a bundled add on of 3d printing tools for checking manifoldness, overhangs, etc.
Personally I do most of my modeling in SCAD based environments, probably mostly because I am a programmer.
blender works fine … so does 3dsmax , rhino or sketchup … you just need to export a stl so the program doesn’t matter
I know someone that was a wiz at Blender make excellent 3D printable parts. It’s best for sculpted designs. You can use it for mechanical designs but it’s not ideal for that. Alibre Atom3D might be an option. It’s paid, $200 up front, $100/yr for maintenance if you want to keep up to date. It’s a decent constraints based solid modeling CAD that doesn’t need a constant internet connection to work.
Go for FreeCAD :~)
I think Blender is hard to learn. Sketchup is a lot easier, but takes some fussing about to export usable formats. I mostly use FreeCAD. If you think you might like OpenSCAD but also like just throwing solid shapes together, FreeCAD includes OpenSCAD in it.
Fusion 360 can work in offline mode
I will heavily second @Marcus_Alexander_Lin and @John_Bump about FreeCAD. And if you’re interested in OpenSCAD kind of things, I’d suggest having a look at CadQuery and cqparts. I only discovered these yesterday, also integrated in FreeCAD via eponymous workbench, and surely will give it a shot before long!
@lightshadown
You’re comparing 2 different things. Blender is a 3D design modeler. Fusion is a 3D CAD program.
One of the major differences is how the program handles the model Geometrie internally. Blender for example works mainly with models made of triangles. In principle exactly what you use for 3D printing (stl). Fusion on the other hand is based on mathematical described 3D geometry. Like I.e. Nurbs. For 3D printing you need to convert it to triangles before you can slice it.
Therefore it’s easier in Blender to design “free” and more fluid geometry but without parametric. In Fusion it’s easier (and more precise) to design mechanical things because it’s easier to describe them with math. And due to the math you get a parametric model (if you want one)
@Sven_Eric_Nielsen in other words, using blender its hard to learn but better for file usage, and fusion its easier to learn but kinda problematic for printing
that might explain why allways, i have to rotate my desings on the Z plane in order to make them printable and for some reason I end up with a 1mm bigger part when printed.
Anyway, i would check FreeCad and blender and see wich one fits me better.
Thanks everyone for the Info
Well, yes and no. With blender you get exactly what you see. In fusion you need to convert the model to a stl. This is always a compromise but the resolution is usually so high that it doesn’t matter.
In principle it means the following :
In fusion its easier to design precise mechanical kompononent. Things where you know exactly the dimensions and properties.
In blender it’s easier to design things where accuracy is not the highest priority like organic models.
By the way, freecad is basically the same concept like fusion. Parametric mathematically defined models.
And as a side note :
If your part is always 1mm bigger then expected I would first check the printer calibration. With such a big failure it’s very unlikely that the design software is the guilty one.