Now for the plan stage, key elements you should resolve before approaching the desktop 3D printer. The setup stage focuses on considerations before you have a project. The plan picks up from these types of considerations, but explores them very much with a specific project in mind. From this point forward these topics take it for granted, that now you do have a project and you're ready to pursue it. This is a stage that is underserved by the 3D printing community. Where the speed of iteration is often used to iron out these concepts in real time. But you are more clever than that, and are willing to take a little bit more time to work through these stages so that you can get further with your designs and waste less time in the long run. At the very least, before you start modeling, before you even lock the concept for your project, take a moment to think about the hardware and materials you will have available. Even if you're not ready to commit to a single decision for each, considering your options and eliminating a few options will save you time and boost your success with output. The primary topics for the plan are establishing requirements, selecting software and pipeline, selecting hardware and materials, okay? So first, establishing requirements. Okay, let's start with an important one. What are the project requirements? What I mean by this is what do you need to have in hand at the end of this project to complete it successfully. This might mean you need to deliver a printed part as a primary consideration. But in many cases this isn't true. You need to deliver a design with a 3D printed part as clear physical evidence that this design is a good one. The actual primary deliverable might instead be the design files themselves with the 3D printed model merely as a state. Traditional design training does a good job of preparing a team for facing this particular challenge. But even those who never went to an engineering or industrial design program, quickly pick up this from experiences working with clients and collaborators. If you're clear at the start on deliverables, you might not get paid. But taking this further with preparing for 3D printed parts, often the 3D printed part will not be the primary deliverable. This doesn't diminish the value of the need to sort out the requirements. This actually can boost them if for example, you are demonstrating how a potential strong metal part will function in the future when it is manufactured from the design specifications. Then you need to have in mind how strong your prototyping part needs to be to functionally represent the engineering property you need to exhibit. Thanks to the boost and range of materials for printing with this technology that has come with the introduction of new composite materials to the market. You can find a way to match most types of properties for the purpose of proving a design, but you will need to plan routes to achieve this. And have the requirements at the start of your project instead of something you realize at the eleventh hour without time to try other materials or part strengthening techniques. Establishing requirements is divided into two subtopics, establish design scope and establish project, and part parameters. Establishing design scope, when I refer to design scope, I'm talking about the bigger picture as far as the reason to create the project in the first place. The use of a 3D printed part is always secondary to solving a project design consideration. Unless like me, you spend all of your time and energy and life working for 3D printer companies. The design scope may take place far from anyone who touches the 3D printing aspect. But you need it in place, including a sense of the relative value of the printed part to the mission as a whole. Which often influences the printing budget. One consideration that is often missed by teams. You can use 3D printing even in the earliest stages of defining a project to help with design exploration, including material, color and texture research. 3D printing is inexpensive enough that many product design teams will now use them as a fast means of making a quick physical output from a larger library of parts in past projects. To help a team save time when considering which routes their designs will follow. Printing out a little section of a project they've completed the past, I'm looking at it, can tell you, are you going to do this again? Are you going to go in completely new direction? Establishing project and park parameters. This second sub topic is where the nitty gritty of the 3D part requirements are pinned down. I've noticed that the teams who skip over the stage usually are assuming to use 3D printing for quote-unquote, default materials and processes. Usually being, printing TLA with a 0.4 millimeter nozzle, for a point 0.15 or 0.2 millimeter layer height. Emphasizing surface finish over strength. So by omission, they did create clear part requirements. That said, if the printed part really should have been produced differently. And if the team instead wanted something small, high resolution and really, really strong. Then that team or individual missed the chance to catch that earlier, which affects all of the expectations for both digital science and printing processes planned to support them. Selecting software and pipeline. The next major topic with the plan is selecting software and pipeline. What software tools and techniques are needed. While picking a specific software package and methodology for design is out of scope for this course. Consideration for how to produce a mesh export file that can be easily printed is. So evaluating a testing mesh output should be an easy task before investing too much time within a specific software package. The three sub topics are digital modeling, prepare for mesh export, and mesh analysis, and repair. Digital modeling. These days there are so many options for viable 3D design software available to artists, engineers, educators and designers, that we barely have enough time to read off a list of those worth using. The good news is that there has been so much progress on all fronts to make the software easier and more intuitive to use, at least in terms of the trajectory CAD has been on for decades now. Including easier and more stable expert tools that you now have plenty of latitude to explore and find the solution that works for you. My advice would be to select the software that you can afford for the project, that you enjoy using, and that can deliver the required features for your mesh, with the fewest extra steps you can manage. If you're designing mechanical objects, your life is pretty easy. Most solid CAD design tools can deliver what you need in a single export dialog. Two examples where paths always include multiple tools are architecture firms, designing it one-to-one for the entire building. We need to scale to one to 200 or other factors. Medical professionals working with dense volumetric scans close to the target build off low scale with a mesh so tightly packed. With so many polygons that opening and manipulating the model can cripple or crash most 3D control software packages. Projects in these two areas more frequently rely on third-party tools, some of the most expensive in the field. To take all that data, and eliminate it down to just what you need. So you may find yourself needing not only several different packages, but sorting out a pathway among them that is the most efficient for your process. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this course, designers using a range of 3D packages can successfully deliver printable meshes. Selecting a software solution for design can range beyond the professional CAD packages like Solid Works, Vinner, Pro-E, Fusion 360, On Shape, Rhino, NX. To any package that can deliver an STL, OBJ, or three mesh file. Those that have been validated for water tightness precision. To a target level of tolerances, and other features associated with professional cut. But depending on the type of surfaces and parts you're looking for, you may want to make use of generative design and 3D animation tools, they don't build any solid modeling validation strategies. What enlarges your options are a combination of the increase in numbers of mesh repair and optimization tools capable of taking a great design that was produced using strategies not compatible with desktop 3D printing. And use a variety of tool sets and proprietary tools to breach between that set of expectations and the ones your machine needs from open source mesh lab, to proprietary magics and net fab. To tools such as Meshmixer and digital sculpting giant ZBrush, whose tool set for re-mixing complex high quality objects for interactive and cinema find additional utility as killer features for remessing for desktop 3D printing. So rather than thinking I can only use one type of software, I would instead point out that whatever route you use, there is probably a path trace through it for how to prep this type of mesh anticipated for that approach. If you haven't used a software package with desktop 3D printing before the first two tests you should do as quickly as you can. Can you export a watertight STL mesh model? Are you able to scale or chop up objects from design scale? Say a one-to-one scale, something huge like a building brought down to 1 to 200 scale down to 3D printers scale and still reflect the features you want to express. A software package can fail both of these tests and still work ikf you use a clever mesh repair tool, but you had better test that route as well before designing your project. There are hardware 3D printing implications to the decision of a design package. Here are key criteria to help you assess which options are right for your next project. Of primary importance, can it generate clean, topologically sound polygonal meshes? STL, OBJ, 3MF, AMF, can you export a file with compatible units of measurement and scale for processing on the hardware available to you? If you are designing a part that you aim to mate with another part or interface with another physical object. You need to confirm that you are able to adjust your model without distorting the overall accuracy. The easy way to test this is to simply print a regular solid like a cube, cone, or cylinder. Where you can make measurements in your design software, 3D control software and then the physical part produced, measure the results and compare. Typically, of critical value of those using a desktop 3D printer for prototyping, you need to have the ability to modify and improve the design after you print the latest version. And without forcing the user to then spend time redesigning an entire piece. Most packages handle this challenge just fine, and to warn you when you're about to commit an act that will really bake a change, filter or calculation, into your model permanently. So this recommendation comes down to picking up an experienced CAD designer's tendency to take extra precautions to back up important measurements, references, and original shapes. State by state as you go through the design before combining or subtracting them using Boolean tools and similar. Next, audit the export from design software and into the 3D control software you will use as early as possible. While there are fewer and fewer surprises these days as developers on both sides of the equation are more mindful of supporting digital fabrication workflow. But when there is an issue in scale, fitting the part inside the build envelope, orienting the part for minimal support needs, the opportunity to do a quick drive run early in the process may save you a lot of heartache later. If you must use design software to produce a part that cannot deliver error fresh meshes, this isn't the end of the world. There are a number of free, affordable, as well as tremendously capable, professional mesh and STL analysis and repair software packages that can help you quickly overcome the more common mesh issues. When it comes to the modelling stage itself, you're lucky if you have an opportunity to suggest best practices to those involve in a digital design process. If you're creating the design, or meeting with those who will, consider first the background that shape the designer's modelling education. If the designer has been trained on solid CAD packages for delivering mechanical elements to be produced by CNC or additive manufacturing. A lot of the critical skills should already be in place, including rounds to update and transform the model based on feedback, without breaking the stability of the mesh. Just like they prevent the process of breaking the stability of the design history. If the background is industrial or product design, ask for the questions. You want to know whether the deliverables have tended to be manufacturing ready solid models, technical drawings, or renderings. Drawings and renderings do not necessarily require the designer to take steps along the way to maintain a watertight model. In fact, in some cases it's more efficient if you don't. This goes double for architects who often needed mix zero thickness surfaces, simplified massing model volumes. And even stacks of flat partially translucent overlays designed to quickly populate a larger space with suggestive illustrations about how these buildings might be used, decorated, and navigated. Interactive and cinematic designers often learned very precise approaches to building a model and manage various aspects involved the suit challenging time sensitive workflows. Though rarely are these specific niche needs a perfect match for 3D printing. In animation in particular, often, designers will interpenetrate all kinds of very simple volumes, just working to get that outer look to be what they want without caring about the internal integrity. The use of UV mapping to deliver perceived geometric details, by wrapping simpler shapes with specially constructed flat bump maps, is particularly disappointing for 3D printing. Those great fine details just fall away, when you strip those textures off. You really need to see if you can transfer the texture maps to become actual geometry. The good news is that the requirements for 3D printing can be met by most designers if alerted. And a number of tools exist to bridge between fields more focused on renderings than fully dimensioned mesh surfaces. Modeling considerations, here are a few design considerations that can help you create outputs well suited to 3D printing in specific. Is your model manifold? It needed to be watertight and you can ensure this by using mesh repair tools to inspect your export and make sure it passes. Of course, it is best to take care to build a model as watertight solid in the design software in the first place, but that is beyond the scope of this series. Be mindful of printing constraints, have you eliminated overhangs that can be eliminated? As you've learned from the lectures focused on how the process of 3D printing functions. 3D printing models are created from the bottom up, layer by layer in order to place the material higher up in a model, it is necessary to have something underneath to support it. We can use a 3D control software to add support material to overhangs automatically. But if you're able to make a slight adjustment to your design, and avoid support and the support material, your print will be produced more quickly and perhaps the surfaces will look better. There are a few corollaries to this rule, you can generally get away with an overhang angle of about 45 degrees, plus or minus 5 degrees. And you can gain that by adjusting what angle the support script will kick in using your control software. And using that technique you could sometimes get away with overhangs that are just beyond the tipping point as a result. Also, you can use bridging with materials like PLA, by moving quickly across the short gap support on both sides with active cooling running, you can often successfully lay down material with nothing to support it. A bridge that will tighten up as more layers are run on top of the initial bridging layers. When considering what features will be reflected in your final part consider this. The smallest feature in x, y cannot be smaller than twice the line width, which is dependent on the nozzle selected. For example, a 0.4 millimeter nozzle on Ultimaker, is assigned in print profiles as 0.35 millimeter line width. Drill will ignore all geometry smaller than 0.35 millimeters in the x y. If you want your detail to be visibly reflected in your model, the smallest dimension must be 0.7 millimeters, though I'd recommend a little bit more closer to 1 millimeter. For the smallest features in z, you need your feature to be at least twice the thickness of a layer to even be visible. But practically speaking, I wouldn't suggest less than three or more layers to produce something you can really notice on the Z. Repair from mesh export, just because the software package offers a mesh export, doesn't mean that it will be well implemented. It is always worth checking for 3D printing specific device for export from the design software's you're using. And to save yourself later agony, export your project very early in the design process, and bring it into the 3D printer control software. Take a look at it and preview and make sure the critical features you need to bring through will make it. This is also a good chance to confirm that the scale and size of your model is properly reflected, and that each segment of your design can fit in the build envelope of your 3D printer. If there is a mesh export dialog, see if you have opportunities to just scale and units to millimeters within the software package itself. Not only does this safe you the trouble of scaling this model in a third party tool that may introduce inconsistencies. More and more the packages with export to 3DP dialogues, especially on Windows 10 using the 3MF format and system level 3D mesh manipulation packages, offer analysis and validation checks at this stage. Where you can take action immediately to adjust the output or select an appropriate repair tool. While it is possible to produce extremely high-quality meshes from CAD programs like Solidworks, Bino and Fusion 360. Not to mention the output possible from animation and digital sculpture software, like ZBrush, Max and Maya. As discussed in other lectures, you might be doing yourself a disservice to bring in a file at such a high resolution, that is difficult for 3D control software to open and for mesh repair software to clean it. I discussed targeting under 500,000 polis or at least less than a million polis. The way to quickly test what you need is to export a low resolution and see if faceting will be reflected on the curves of the resulting part. If not, further triangles might not be helping you for example, with SolidWorks It is better to export a course mesh than a higher resolution one, for more efficient processing and better surfaces. Mesh analysis and repair, having a mesh repair tool handy can not only help you detect an issue with a model that is not visible on the screen, no matter how you squint at it and zoom in on it. It is also a useful tool to transform your model to a target scale, and evaluate the number of polygons we used to produce it. I've mentioned it several times throughout this lecture sharing the various routes, and where you may find yourself going through a mesh repair tool on the way into 3D control software. Selecting hardware and materials, what machines materials and configurations will produce my part successfully? Often missed, you should be thinking what equipment and material you'll be using as early in the process as possible. While this step plays less of a role if you only have access to one machine and one material. It is important to point out that even in one machine, one material context, how you could figure that machine swapping out nozzles for example, and how you intend to use that material. It needs support in specific areas to protect overhangs, begins to multiply the printing scenarios even with a single machine. So what about the opposite extreme, what if you do not know what machine or material you will have access to, how will you prepare for that? Here's where it's useful to point out which details are more critical to know during the design phase than the others? We will divide the discussion into the following subsections, select machines, how should machines be configured, and what materials meet part requirements? Again, select hardware and materials as early in the process as you can. Select machines. The key considerations I suggest for machines are as follows. Build envelope, remember that you can segment large designs to produce them in multiple pieces, print speed and access window. Do I have time? Support needs, do you need multiple materials, resolution? What are the smallest features you must fabricate, and what scale must you fabricate them to actually have them show up in the final print? There are other considerations as well, but I have folded those into the following subsections along with configurations and materials. How should machines be configured? There are many configuration elements from machine to machine, but these three are the most common to consider. Nozzle size, helps indicate line within layer hired options, nozzle materials, brass, frictionless, hardened, feed mechanism, direct versus burden, tension versus fixed feeder. Nozzle size effects line with end layer height, at the most basic level your printed object is like a drawing a 3D space. And you can use that way of thinking to help you figure out what nozzle size makes sense for accomplishing your model. Think of this, use a thin marker and the same outlines versus a fat marker which can barely fit inside. Can you accomplish your 3D drawing with the thin marker, or the fake marker? Nozzle material, while most desktop FFF nozzles are by default brass, you will need to switch to a harder metal or chemically hardened nozzle. If materials you wish to process are more abrasive than the brass, or else you will quickly wear out your nozzles and your parts will print more and more in precisely. Until the orifice of the nozzle is too wide for you to predict in any way the behavior of the material squirting out of it. How do you know what an abrasive material is? Most filament vendors should indicate in the descriptions or technical data sheet. But the rule of thumb is that any thermoplastic is acting as a carrier for powdered or chopped fiber, minerals, woods or metals should trigger research into whether you need a tougher nozzle. Here's one people frequently miss, glow in the dark filaments typically contain the metal strong to illuminate. These glow in the dark materials can be among the most abrasive for your machine. Bottom line if you cannot use a hardened nozzle, this reduces the list of materials that you can select from in order to fabricate an object. Before you take this to mean that the best practice Is always use a hard nozzle, this is not necessarily the case. Even among those who frequently use abrasive materials, the percentage of projects that use hardened nozzles and abrasive materials tend to hover in the 10 to 20% range based on our recent polling. Part of this is due to the high cost of abrasive materials. Which can run multiple times the expenses of other materials. But the other reason is that most of what people use the desktop 3D printer for can be accomplished very well with just a handful of the more affordable, easy to process materials. And the majority of the best profiles and best practices from others in the field centers around PLA, ABS, ASA, PET, etc, on systems with a brass nozzle. Also, unfortunately, many of the high strength abrasive materials proved to be far less strong than advertised when actually processed. Look to resources such as 3D matters opt in matter, which I believe is still hosted online, to get a sense of how your target materials behave when printed. They may be more trouble and more money than they are worth. One more machine selection consideration, the feed mechanism. If you're hoping to work with a very flexible load durometer material, you may need to go with a direct drive feeder. Preferably a mechanism that is specifically built to also support and improve the use of flexible materials as you guide them through the feeder. Otherwise, they can buckle and you can have a more difficult time getting precise output of those materials. What materials meet part requirements? If the project you're looking to produce is a prototype on a desktop 2D printer, requiring overall strength. Load bearing along particular axis, flexibility, transparency, water, heat, chemical resistance, or even just more than one color. That already tells you quite a bit about the machine and materials you are looking for. Taking a moment to consider your options for running your job, you may discover that you won't find it easy to meet those requirements with what you have access to currently. Are you able to obtain access to other equipment? Can you afford the time and fees associated with using it? If you know this early, there are a number of adjustments you can make during the design process to better accommodate the machine and materials available. Here are the key materials questions to keep in mind. Multi-materials? Key properties required? Load bearing, heat resistance, chemical resistance, functional, lubrication, fit, form. Ideally, you identifying options as early in the process as possible. Remember, even if you were to have only one machine in material available, how you configure the machine and process the material still represents a number of decisions that can impact your design. If you can't choose until late in the process, target a material capable option like Altmaker. Remember, there is credit for partial answers here. Any steps you take to improve how well your project matches your resources, ahead of the moment you need to print fabricated will put you in a better situation than the alternative, with no planning and a tight deadline ahead of you. I'd like to reiterate that you do not need to solve the problems yet, just to identify what you know, which in turn will help you sort out how to test and fabricate using this device. Somewhere over the course of this stage, the project has picked up project requirements, a digital design, a concrete plan for printing the part. Now it is time to head to the job stage, to commit all of our planning to a specific set of print instructions.
