3D Printing from SU by Sweet Onion Creations
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While at the 3DBC, I met Jake Cook, who spoke during the "SketchUp Cool Stuff" presentation. His firm produces 3D prints from SU models for architects and designers:
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I just received a note from Jake asking if there was a particular forum, group, or venue at SCF for discussing SketchUp and digital fabrication. Any thoughts, guys?
Jake passed several interesting printed models around, including one of the Disney Concert Hall model from the Google 3D Warehouse.
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Was it his company that gave away the $1500 worth of modeling as a door prize at 3D Basecamp?
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I'm not sure if he was responsible for that door prize. I asked him to contribute some images of his prints to this thread.
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That's great. I went on his website, there's some nice stuff.
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That does look like pretty interesting stuff. I wonder what 3D printing method he uses? (sterolithiography, FDM etc.)
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@remus said:
That does look like pretty interesting stuff. I wonder what 3D printing method he uses? (sterolithiography, FDM etc.)
He has a Zcorp 310, I believe, that prints in a plaster-like material which they hand-finish and color. The model must first be converted to STL and made water-tight; I wasn't familiar with the software he used for that process. I don't believe it's the item provided by Zcorp itself,
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Just did a little reading on the printer. It's quite compatible with a lot of software.
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Hi!
Last year I was troubleing with printing my 3D model of old town in Osijek, Tvrdja.
I have an problem with converting skp to stl and after 2 months I have succeed to convert it in one firm which is an dealer for Z corp.Here are some pictures of model!
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If you are on a MAC, then Cheetah 3D does a great job converting to STL, as does Silo
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@lewiswadsworth said:
I'm not sure if he was responsible for that door prize. I asked him to contribute some images of his prints to this thread.
Hi Everybody,
My name is Jake from Sweet Onion Creations out of Bozeman, Montana. We had a blast down at 3D Basecamp last week and met some really nice, smart people. We donated the door prize because it seems everybody has a cool design that needs to be brought to life. We'll post pics of what the winner comes up with.
Lewis and I had a great chat about 3-D printing and we're more than happy to upload a few photos of a couple buildings we built off 3D Warehouse for examples. (Note: King Kong climbs the Empire State Building and not the Chrysler Building in the film. However, we feel any large structure looks better with a monkey hanging off it. Unfortunately, most architects don't feel the same way.)
We're also working on putting together some videos of the process...very basic clips but we'd love to hear everybody's reaction and input.
If anybody has questions about 3D printing, STL files, tips, etc. Feel free to post and I'll do my best to answer. Thanks for viewing!
Jake
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Hi Jake and welcome to SCF, we chatted in the limo on way to San Jose airport.
I am still interested in candy 3D printing.
I have one question, during your presentation you made available your models for everyone to touch and view, is there anyway to get the overall model smoother? It seemed a little rough to the touch.
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@solo said:
Hi Jake and welcome to SCF, we chatted in the limo on way to San Jose airport.
Oh really? was that before the champagne jacuzzi or after the clay shooting?
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Hi Jake. Thanks for joining in, and for the photos. It's so nice to see rapid prototyping from SketchUp. So many "NURBS-snobs" of my acquaintance have dismissed SU as incapable of producing satisfactory models for 3D printing! (There's some irony in that position, since an STL file itself is a mesh format and not NURBS.)
Since the question has come up, what format do you actually end up sending to the printer? When I worked for YSOA, we had a Dimension ABS printer that accepted only water-tight STL files. The models were typically made in Rhino, but then the Rhino-generated STL files were still run though Geomagic to make sure they were absolutely tight.
What do you end up doing with mesh files from SketchUp to get the 310 to like them?
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@kwistenbiebel said:
Oh really? was that before the champagne jacuzzi or after the clay shooting?
I imagine "Wild Pete" taking a champagne jacuzzi...
actually these limos looked great from outside but were some 9 seated mini vans from inside (rether uncomfortable)
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@lewiswadsworth said:
Since the question has come up, what format do you actually end up sending to the printer? When I worked for YSOA, we had a Dimension ABS printer that accepted only water-tight STL files. The models were typically made in Rhino, but then the Rhino-generated STL files were still run though Geomagic to make sure they were absolutely tight.
What do you end up doing with mesh files from SketchUp to get the 310 to like them?
We do end up using watertight STL files (or as absolutely close as we can get them). We eventually purchased some software just for repairing STL files. I know ZCorp is offering their ZEdit solution as well but we have no experience using it.
You're right though...if you don't respect the meaning of "watertight" than you're disappointed when it comes out of the machine in tiny little fragments.
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@solo said:
Hi Jake and welcome to SCF, we chatted in the limo on way to San Jose airport.
I am still interested in candy 3D printing.
I have one question, during your presentation you made available your models for everyone to touch and view, is there anyway to get the overall model smoother? It seemed a little rough to the touch.
Hi! Nice to bump into you online. For being such a fancy limo, why didn't the air conditioning work?
Regarding your question on roughness: The models can be left more raw if you're going for quick concepts (this is what we're shooting to present at 3D Basecamp...download, print, harden, paint in under 3 hours). However, if you want very high quality, we sand and build up a base primer coat and then match colors off a rendering. This takes more time but the result is a very smooth surface and almost look like they have been through an injection molding process.
Here's a shot of the results:
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@bznjc said:
We do end up using watertight STL files (or as absolutely close as we can get them). We eventually purchased some software just for repairing STL files. I know ZCorp is offering their ZEdit solution as well but we have no experience using it.
Jake,
There has been much debate over which piece of software (or Ruby script) is most effective for converting SKP to STL. What do you folks end up using?
(Pete, I assume you're familiar with Evil Mad Scientist Lab's Candy 3D printer?)
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We just wrote a new STL exporter for Sketchup. The ones we found did not correctly export components so you had to go through and explode them all. It is part of the CADspan plugin which is our product. The resurfacer works to generate watertight stl from Sketchup. Hope it helps people if they are printing to Sweet Onion, to us, or your own machine.
Best
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I should point out, that this was not by Sweet Onion Creations, but rather by a local z-corp printer.
I was very happy with the level of detail, but felt our model fell short in a number of areas that it didn't have to be.
- Surface shouldn't be so splotchy. Was later told it was because of the timeline, but never discussed issue with us in advance.
- The seam could have been made much better
- The base was warped, and not square, not not really sanded well or at all. For cost of work, might as well spend more time on the base.
At any rate, I posted this as a demonstration of the level of detail you can get (our walls are about an inch tall) but also so you know not all printers are the same, even if using the same machine.
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Hi David,
Sorry to hear your first experience with a z-corp machine left a bit to be desired. However, the level of detail on the model is very nice. Was the model for a healthcare clinic?
Seams can be tricky to work with...with a bit of work you can get pretty solid surfaces where the edges touch. Yet, they can take a bit of time. Here's a few photos of before and after. Also, thought you might get a kick out of this small bathroom and room layout we did for a client that builds temporary housing plans using SketchUp. Amazing what can come out of 3D Warehouse and eventually a 3d printer.
How did the model work for your client meeting?
Jake
Sweet Onion Creations
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