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Comment on I need advice about whether to dive in or not

Blender has a ton of “movie” features, such as animation, keyframes, bones, etc. etc. Its almost entirely focused on movie-making.

Rhino, which is a freeform CAD program for industrial design has many more features. Not only is it $1000 however, but its focus on making artistic 3d printed models is obvious once you use such a program.

AutoCAD is more of an engineer’s tool. Its extremely precise but non-artistic in design. Its $4000 as well, but also the wrong tool for making a board game piece.

You’re using the wrong 3d program (Blender) to make your board game pieces. That’s all I’m saying. The people in the know would use a program like Rhino (or a comparable industrial design 3d to manufacturing tool). Blender can work, but its obvious that it doesn’t have the CAD or CAM features that a proper industrial tool would have.

Without a CAM-plugin package, are you even sure that your design can be 3d printed correctly? Have you thought about how the 3d printer nozzle (or CNC mill, or whatever you’re using) will create the end-product? Do you have holes in your design?

Do you have any overhangs that are unstable or unable to be printed?

www.3dprintingera.com/3d-printing-overhangs-and-b…

A tool like RhinoCAM-Mesh (ugggh, another $1000, but you get the gist of this hobby…) will automatically 3d print supports that will snap off so that whatever shape you wanted will be possible to be made.

mecsoft.com/products/rhinocam/rhinocammesh/

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GoldenSpamfish@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’m a heavy parametric CAD user, so I’m not very knowledgeable on blender, but I do know a lot of people who use it for this sort of modeling. It does actually have some really good parametric CAD plugins for when you need mesh parts to work well with precise dimensions.

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PeleSpirit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Blender has a ton of “movie” features, such as animation, keyframes, bones, etc. etc. Its almost entirely focused on movie-making.

I appreciate what you’re saying but I’m not sure you’ve used Blender lately. It does sculpting, 3d tech and all that, it gets very precise. It’s not as easy to use as AutoCAD and Revit to get precise, but you can do it. All of the architects and engineers I know and work with use AutoCad and Revit and it’s for creating details for arch & hvac drawings. The company I’m working with said they will adjust the file and have that built into the price for manufacturing. I just want to give them a clean file. Thanks though, I don’t think I need it for this, the company I’m working with knows what I’m giving them and seem fine. It’s one component of a huge puzzle.

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- dragontamer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  It does sculpting, 3d tech and all that, it gets very precise
  
  I’m not talking about sculpting. I’m talking about overhangs and other fundamental issues that 3d printers need to solve before the darn thing is printed.
  
  I’m looking up Blender’s features, and it seems like there are features that can do this stuff (ex: docs.blender.org/manual/…/3d_print_toolbox.html), but even then…
  
  Blender can be used to created meshes for 3D printing. Meshes exported from Blender are usually imported into a piece of software takes the mesh and “slices” it into paths that the 3D printer can execute. An example of such Slicer software is Cura.
  
  Even in Blender’s manual, it seems like they’re suggesting you need a 2nd piece of software to do this job well.
  
  The physical act of creating a 3d print needs to be thought of, especially in artistic designs. You will often create impossible shapes (most noticeably overhangs), especially if you’re ignorant to the whole 3d printing process. Having good software that detects these situations is… well… maybe not necessary. But it helps.
  
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  - fsniper@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Blender has great add-ons for 3dprinting too. And are you trying to advertise a software? With 3dprinting impossible shapes are possible, but overhangs are not one of them. You can use supports, you can reorient your design, you can use bridging..
    
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