3D printing
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Is Sketchup Pro 2015 better able to do 3D printing?
I stopped using Sketchup back in 2012 because Sketchup had so many holes in it's drawings.
The drawings were nice and everything "looked" good but there were always lots of holes and you can not 3D print with holes.
I tried to search for 3D printing but all I get is advertisements.
This community was always so helpful in the past, I sorta missed you.
Ralph
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If you are aware of the tiny faces problem, modeling for 3D printing is no problem.
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and how do you become aware of the tiny faces problem?
What exactly is the tiny faces problem?
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Hi Ralph, Sketchup was originally designed to work on things that are building sized, and has a limit on creating faces at 1/1000". If you are working on a small scale project, scaling up by 100 or 1000x will let you perform most operations while maintaining a solid object. By being aware of that limitation, you can work around it to minimize holes.
To answer your original question...
@ralphxyz said:
Is Sketchup Pro 2015 better able to do 3D printing?
Not much has changed with regards to performance for 3D printing. There is a new 3D printing template that comes with Sketchup, that has a 3D printer build area component to help you scale model to print size.
Sketchup added the ability to tell if a model is "Solid" in Sketchup 8. Are you familiar with that? If not, here is a little tutorial: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/understanding-solid-objects-in-google-sketchup-8.html
Does that help?
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I have been drawing a big amount of good 3D objects with SketchUp Version 8. You just have to make things correctly. I use Netfabb basic to check my errors or close holes. NFB helps me a lot! Scaling or not halving 0.1 mm makes things easier. I have found Sketchup easy to learn and my drawings are getting better all the time. You can try purely mathematical program OpenScad.
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