Blender for 3D Printing¶
This tutorial serves as a standalone introduction to using Blender for 3D printing. It intentionally skips over parts of Blender to prioritize getting up to speed as quickly as possible.
It is designed as the companion material for an in-person class, so many details are intended to be filled out in lecture/demo format rather than in the text here. The exercises along the way are designed to be performed sequentially, and build upon one another.
The tutorial is divided into three sections:
- Interface
- Helps you get familiar with the interface; shows how to manipulate 3D objects in Blender
- Mesh modeling
- Describes concepts and demonstrates tools for adding and changing mesh geometry
- Printing
- Practical guidelines and tips for a successful 3D print
What is Blender?¶
Blender is powerful free and open source 3D creation suite. See the Blender website for features, which include mesh modeling, animation, a full video editor, game engine, camera and object tracking, and more. People can (and do) make movies with it. We will just be using its mesh modeling features.
Getting Blender¶
Available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD from blender.org. Download the zip file, uncompress it, and run Blender right from it – no installation necessary.
About¶
Comments or issues about these materials, or want to add your own content? See the github page, specifically the issue tracker..
Copyright 2016 Ryan Dale
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.