I recently pledged on Kickstarter to for a 3d printer. Yes, the The Buccaneer. Hopefully there are no risks and everything goes well and it would arrive Feb 2014. Long wait, but may be worth it.
I have been prepping myself for using this 3d printer by learning 3d modeling. I came to know about Autodesk’s Inventor Fusion from a colleague. I tried it and felt it to be a bit complex. However, Autodesk also has 123D Design. Think of this as a lite version of the Inventory Fusion. Awesome product. It has a bunch of tutorials on Youtube. Watching about 12 videos, one would become quite familiar with using this simple tool. The tool is simple, but the designs that can be made have no limitation, they can be quite complex. I use this on my iMac and the only drawback it has is that it crashes sometimes. So, it’s very important to keep saving your work periodically.
The other day I was trying to design a disk with a face. For the mouth, I added a torus and tried to combine the disk and the torus using the “Subtract” operation. Then it gave me an error “Combine failed. Bodies are not intersecting”. I scratched my head quite a bit on this because I know for sure both the disk and the torus were indeed intersecting. I just gave up and instead drew a simple with spline, extruded it and then subtracted it and moved on.
Anyway, as I am all exited about the new 3d printer that would be coming next year (Yeah, it’s a painfully long wait, but Kickstarter backers have to get used to this type of wait as compared to ordering with Amazon Prime and getting it the next day or the day after!) I was thinking what all should I print. I visited the Thingiverse and have a couple of them in mind. But I also wanted to design something of my own. My son’s name happened to have 6 letters and the cube has 6 faces. So, I thought I will create a hollow cube and subtract the letters of the name one from each face of the cube. When I started doing this with “A” I again got the above mentioned error. Then I realized what’s going on. Thing is, subtracting “A” or the torus from a sheet creates two separate parts. So the “Bodies are not intersecting” is related to the final shape after subtracting. It appears, and probably makes sense, that after subtraction there should still be a single connected body. Otherwise think how the two disconnected bodies will stay put together? Mystery solved.
But I still need to proceed with my idea of creating a cube with letters on the faces. What I ended up doing was, to first take “A” and another thin block and subtract that block from the letter right at the middle on the horizontal line of “A”. This makes the middle triangle now to be connected to the rest of the body when subtracted.
It’s possible to get away like this for all the alphabet. In fact, the list of alphabet that will have problem are A, B, D, O, P, Q and R. Just 7 letters. Rest all don’t have the above mentioned problem. Perhaps we need a new font just for 3d Printing.
Update: I finally ended up canceling my pledge for The Buccaneer and go with The Bukito. Will know in a few months if that was a wise decision.