Bystroushaak's blog / English section / 3D printing / How to set Blender for 3D printing

How to set Blender for 3D printing

I use this empty Blender file as a template for creating projects for 3D printing.

http://storage.rfox.eu/setting_up_blender_for_3D_printing/template.blend

There is nothing special in it, except that the measurement units are preset to more suitable units, so that the STL exports work right out of the box, and you don't have scaling issues in Slicer software:

More specifically:

Plugins

It may also be a good idea to turn on two Blender add-ons, which are shipped with Blender, but turned off by default:

They both add a new menu to the toolbar.

3D-Print Toolbox

This add-on allows you to export STL for printing with one click. It also has Check all and Make Manifold buttons, which are sometimes useful. They can sometimes fix models which act weirdly in Slicer because they have weird geometry.

Measureit

This allows you to measure distances between vertexes, angles and so on. You have to select for example two vertexes and then click on Segment button, then on Show next to the ghost and you'll see something like this.

It can allow you more cad-like modeling with precision, but it doesn't survive transformations, and it sometimes acts weird, so usefulness is limited.

Become a Patron