Super thrilled to see that some things from BlendSwap quickly jumped over to Thingiverse!

This gator hails from BlendSwap originally, but now it’s been downloaded and printed out!  Super-neat!

In this series, we’ll cover the Blender 2.5 interface, starting with the big picture and zooming in on key things that can be helpful. Blender’s ease of use has been greatly improved with 2.5, but it’s still definitely something of a “space station” when you first crack it open. In this first entry on the subject we’ll take a hard look at Blender’s overall structure to illuminate why it looks the way it does, and give new users a handle on where they should expect to find things. (If it’s basic survival in the 3D view you’re after, this tutorial still holds, although an update is coming soon.)

At the very top layer, Blender’s display is composed of panels. Rather than give in and move to a Windows-based API for the many sub-displays and sub-menus a program as complex as Blender will require, the developers have created something unique and (to me at least) more elegant than any other interface I know of. Panels cannot overlap. Rather, the Blender main window is subdivided into panels, and any time a panel cannot show all its buttons or icons, they will gracefully flow to the size available. The sides of any panel can be dragged to resize them, and they develop scroll bars as needed. Everything is in a panel, whether it’s a 3D view, the timeline, or a hierarchy editor.

Each panel may be subdivided by dragging the textured-looking corner on its top-right into the panel. Dragging it out of the panel un-subdivides, allowing the user to quickly “glob together” some or all of the available panels:

Each panel also has an icon that lets you change its type, so any one view can be changed into any other.  There are, um, a LOT of different kinds of panel:

However, if your primary focus is Blender-to-3D-Print, you’ll only really care about the 3D view, menu, and Properties panels for now. (If you’re like me, of course, the call of Blender’s animation and video editing capabilities is pretty seductive…) The animation, game engine, node editor and video sequence editor are, so far as modeling is concerned, not important.

The 3D view panel is one of the most complex and most used panels. It can be subdivided to create the familiar 2×2 multiview or simply navigated as-is. On its left and right there are subpanels with their own functions, and it also has sub-modes, including the “edit” and “sculpt” modes which are probably the most important for only 3D modeling. We’ll cover this one in more detail later, but for now, let’s just say it’s where you’ll do most of your shape-creation and move on.

The menu panel is easily mistaken for a special structure. It is not. It’s just another panel. However, its default position at the top of the screen is where it will probably stay, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. This is where you’ll find all the top-level commands, and where Blender 2.5 now throws a lot of its warnings and alerts.

The properties panel over on the right is probably as complicated as the 3D view, but for the purposes of making non-animated, non-rendered meshes, most of its parts can be ignored. In fact, for 3D printing purposes, you probably won’t need anything but the modifier stack unless you’re trying to do simulation-based models.

This sequence isn’t trying to replace Blender’s excellent online documentation, but rather to provide a functional introduction for 3D print use, ignoring things like texturing, lighting, and animation. Next week we’ll dive into the 3D view panel in detail, examining how to navigate and create in Blender 2.5. In some ways this will rehash things I said back in my very first Blender tutorial, but in 2.5 a lot of things are subtly easier, and I’ve learned one or two tricks that will be very helpful to new users.

All this talk about daring do on the 3D printing scene has me thinking about a place I’ve been checking out a lot for a while now, a place where you’ll find a lot of stuff that’s not made to be printable, but which you probably could, if you got lucky with your slicer settings and were thinking ahead a bit on positioning:  Blendswap!

Blendswap is a CGI-universe twin to Thingiverse, where users create and share 3D designs for rendering rather than printing.  Blendswap was used heavily by Sintel, when the actual community of fans of the project joined forces with the art team to create much of the content for the film!  Of course here you won’t find designs made to be printed.  You’ll find designs made to look awesome.  But maybe, if you can get your slicer and your bot to rise to the challenge, you could use it to print things that look awesome.

So, as we are talking of bravado lately, and as you may be fishing around for something to impress your various relations with to show off how amazing your new 3D printer is, why not take a leap and try to print, say, a brick speeder or a space ship or a humanoid robot?

BlendSwap and Thingiverse are two great parts of the same arena: shareable 3D design.  The better the printers and their software get, the more printable the works of artists who previously only worked on the screen will become.

There are a lot of spindles on Thingiverse, but this one might be my new favorite for the marbles. Easy to acquire and inexpensive bearings for a smooth gliding spindle for feeding out filament, or for putting a big round platter on so everyone can reach the mashed potatoes.

Not too many surprises here, Thingiverse users are still in large portion engineering and design types, but as 3D printing grows in popularity, we’re seeing more interest in uses of the technology involving art.  (Another explanation for this is the wording of this question– if you’re asking what people want in other people’s work, you’re going to get a lot of wishlists that include add-ons for existing projects…

Top of the list here is good old fashioned documentation– the more details the better!

And Printability scored pretty high, naturally.  My favorite “other” answer by far was “Nerd Factor”.

It’s pretty hard to argue that that isn’t totally awesome.

Download, print, assemble. Get a little heat shrink tubing for an interface and you could build a nice fountain. I don’t know what the maximum pressure differential is in air, but something similar to this might even drive a paste extruder one day soon. Little widgets. Little proofs of concept. They’re adding up. Every now and then someone puts two or three of them together and proves something else is possible. With the user base growing the way it is lately (and with more players diving into the consumer 3D printing market segment to grasp at this newly invented market share) this hobbyist market is starting to grow up a little. Once again, exciting times.

I remember Metaballs.  Great ages ago, before subdivision surface modeling was standard in everything, long before Blender made it available to everyone, you could get your hands on an organic modeling solution called Metaballs, or Blobs.

These days of course, no animator worth two shakes of a Griffin’s tail would touch them, since they generate fairly awful topology when meshed, but for 3D printing, they might make sense at least as a fun and comparatively intuitive tool for sketching out shapes.  Naturally, like so many things you thought had vanished from the Earth, Blender has them.  Just shift-A add Meta Ball:

(Yes there are a fair number of suboptions here too.)

Once you’ve got one, to figure out what it is you’re doing with this not-terribly-well-rendered sphere, hit shift-d to duplicate and move this new one around.

If this is your first experience with MetaBalls, about now you’re probably thinking, CUTE.  Metaballs attract and “blob” into each other, and were once a primary method for simulating the look of fluids.  (In those days actually simulating the physics of fluids would have been prohibitive, to put it gently.)  Scaling them works, so you can drag them around, add new ones, and generally sculpt-by-adding these blobs together.  They eventually get kind of messy in the selection department pretty quickly, but in terms of ease of adding geometry, they’re pretty sound.

One thing that’s nice about these though is that they’re pretty much always going to be manifold, since they’re a form of Constructive Solid Geometry.  Once you have a shape you’d like to print, just go to the Object menu and select Convert -> Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/Text

(By the way, Blender has a “Generate Text” set of commands which you can then convert into mesh data.)  Blender converts the metaballs into a fairly ugly (at least, to an animator’s eyes) but printable mesh from here:

This can be exported to STL and from there to the printers.

As I’ve said, Blender is often a lot better suited to more organic forms, but I think it’s even more fair to say, the problem’s with holes. Punching a hole in a mesh requires by nature altering its topology, and Blender works best when you’re only mildly altering the topology of the mesh at any given step. For example, in this timelapse I generated using the awesome Cinematic Timelapse Technique, I never punch any holes in the mesh: it’s always topologically equivalent to a sphere.

I think this model might not be the easiest print in the world, but at a modest size I think the droop on the overhanging bits wouldn’t be so great. Much love for this timelapse technique: you get some insight into how more complex modeling with Blender works, and it’s much more visually appealing than a traditional timelapse, which can honestly be kind of disorienting…

Thingiverse just experienced what we in the business call a “catastrophic hardware failure” – a hard drive decided to up and die, taking everything down with it.

Thankfully, Zach and I were able to tag team this problem and get everything migrated to another (better!) server, and restored from backups in about half an hour.  Yeah!

Unfortunately, the latest full backup we had was from this morning, so it looks like we lost data on about 5 things.  We have some partial backups of those and will try to restore what we can of them tomorrow.  In the meantime, if you uploaded a new Thing to Thingiverse today, please go ahead and upload them again.

In the interests of full disclosure, here are the Things we lost:

• Herringbone Geared Extruder Driver by rhys-jones
• Flessenschraper timschmidt
• Printed Quadrocopter by Zaggo
• Little Rocketship by mojomonkey
• C120 Webcam Security Mounts by pandelume

Thanks for bearing with us while we deal with this issue, and special thanks to the folks that dropped us a note to let us know that things were messed up! Our new server should be nicely RAID-enabled, so losing a disk doesn’t mean losing data!