![]() Microsoft is often hit and miss when it comes to aesthetic design and 3D builder is definitely a miss. It's not really conducive to making good art. It's extremely simple layout may appeal to some but for me, it just feels drab, like an office with no windows, or paintings, or a door. The design of 3D Builder is somewhat lacking. I now use 3D builder on all my models to check for errors and to repair or ready them for the physical act of 3D printing. A little while ago Microsoft bought the Netfabb service that has helped them create a powerful set of repair tools for 3D models. While the actual design part of 3D builder leaves a lot to be desired the tools to edit models you have already made are in-depth and hugely helpful. The most important reason people chose Inkscape is: Inkscape is GPL-licensed and maintains public repositories. In the question What are the best graphic design programs Inkscape is ranked 2nd while Blender is ranked 7th. In 3D printing, there are often times when you need to take an existing model and cut it, if your print bed is too small for the model, or reduce the complexity of the file, so it prints faster, or with fewer errors. When comparing Inkscape vs Blender, the Slant community recommends Inkscape for most people. While Tinkercad is great for designing basic 3D models it sometimes lacks in editing models that you already have. The designing workspace is well laid out with important tools in easy reach, things, like making holes and moving workplanes, become so important you need them right at the top all the time. It was the first program I used to make models and the primary colors stand out to me and make learning a little more fun. To combat this Tinkercad created generators that allows you to search for, and use, custom coded shapes that others have made. While there is a lot that can be done with primitives - primitives are simple shapes, squares and spheres and the like - there is a limit to the complexity of the shape you can create without being able to sculpt or edit specific parts. What’s in your 3D modeling toolbox? Let us know in the comments!Īs an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, so if you’ve got something you need to pick up anyway, going to Amazon through this link will help us keep Hacktastic running.Being a browser-based program, Tinkercad has some limitations to what it can do compared to a fully downloaded program. Sometimes that’s based on what tool is best for the job, and sometimes it’s just based on what software they are already comfortable with. Notice that in each example, designers use what is most convenient for the task at hand. Here are physical prints of all the stages of the design: ![]() Starting from a 3D medical scan, tesserato used Blender to create a stylized low-poly version of the mesh, and to form a ring shape, then ZBrush to do some detailed sculpting, then Rhino for precision scaling before exporting for 3D printing. ![]() A fourth program, Meshmixer, was used to optimize thicknesses and size for printing at Shapeways.įinally, consider this amazing Skull Ring by tesserato, who was kind enough to write a detailed design walkthrough How I Made: A Skull Ring. You can read about this design process in the Stylized Catalan Wireframes post on MakerHome. First, we used Mathematica to export the polyhedron’s vertex set to STL, MeshLab to resize the object by a particular scaling factor, and TopMod to create and stylize the wireframe. Here’s an example of a design created using four different software programs: the mathgrrl Deltoidal Hexecontahedron model. Mathematica + MeshLab + TopMod + Meshmixer For example, Shapeways community member aeron203 wrote an excellent tutorial on Textured Models with SketchUp and MeshLab showing how to use SketchUp to create a photo frame with an embedded color image texture, and then MeshLab to convert that model to VRML97 format for printing in Full Color Sandstone. Sometimes you need an extra software program to export to the correct format for 3D printing. This design uses Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to prepare a 2D image of a hand-drawn sketch, Tinkercad to extrude into 3D, and then 3DS Max to round the edges. Here’s another design walkthrough that illustrates how multiple software programs can be used to convert a 2D drawing into a 3D printable designs: How I Made: Custom Bat Wing Earrings by Ghostgirl. Photoshop + Illustrator + Tinkercad + 3DS Max Inkscape is great for manipulating 2D images, but to extrude to 3D and add beveled edges and hinges, the designer had to move to Blender. This design used Inkscape to import a drawing and then create nested offsets (shapes within shapes) of that image. As a simple starting example, let’s look at the angel ornament design created in the Shapeways tutorial Creating a design with moving parts.
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