tyrannosaurus-cat

thingiverse

IT'S SO AMAZING Print Settings Printer: Stratasys Dimension 1200es Rafts: Yes Supports: Yes Resolution: Phenomenal Infill: Not Necessary Notes: This print will require support material, whether it needs rafts or not, you know your printer better than I do! How I Created This Designing AND Engineering As an educator in Design and Technology, I find myself torn between looking into the past of blueprinting and technical drafting, and peering into the future of our complex and diverse industry. While maintaining our current model of industry by training my students to be valued employees in the manufacturing industry, I hope to also prepare them for a future that can 3D print at will. I have found that our primary parametric modeling software, although thoroughly encompassing drafting, only touches the surface of design. Although I can't make Solidworks function like blender, with the right stereolithographic manipulation, we can take existing files floating around the great Cyberiverse and merge them together to create new objects. Step 1: Find some STL files you would like to merge. For this example I used the head from MartinsProjects' T-rex found here:http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:833921 and Cat from YahooJAPANhttp://www.thingiverse.com/thing:182091 (cite your sources people, it's the least you can do) Step 2: Import stl mesh into MeshLab MeshLab! We need to import one of our meshes, select all vertices, and then apply one of my favorite tools. The most difficult part of using STL files with Solidworks is the INTENSE load time. Solidworks likes to work with 25,000 faces or less, often times I find STL files have 1,000,000 faces or more. This leads to Solidworks giving you the "Processing" screen for DAYS at a time. To use our STL in Solidworks we must first simplify the mesh without destroying all of the quality. If we use a Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation and halve our face count repeatedly we can maintain a good topology while decimating all our edges. We can take our 1,000,000 face mesh and drop it down to 20,000 without losing our profile. We can find this tool in MeshLab under: Filters -> Remeshing, Simplification, and Reconstruction -> Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation Quadric Edge Collapse decimation is a really snazzy way to say that we are making groups of small triangles into groups of larger triangles. What is nice is that we can do this quickly and easily in a lightweight, free software. Free is always awesome. Step 3: Importing our simplified stl mesh into Solidworks To open an STL, rather than choosing from all files we must specify to Solidworks that we are opening an STL file specifically. Then, before you click open, check your options. Make sure you are opening the STL as a Solid Body before continuing, you may also want to check your unit scale. Although I would love a 9ft Tyrannosaurus Cat, nobody has time for that print. We simply want to open our simplified meshes into Solidworks and confirm that they are solid parts by either cutting into them, or by using the section view tool. From here you may lop off the limbs of whatever animals you are Doctor Moreau-ing today. Once finished save your new mesh as a Solidworks part. Step 4: Assembly and Completion Now that we have our pieces, we want to merge them all together in an assembly. Start a new assembly and merge those parts together! Once assembled save your assembled monstrosity as a Solidworks Assembly (for later constructions) and save-as an stl file. Make sure that you check your stl options and select "Save all components of an assembly in a single file". Now, if you have managed to follow my text-dense, pictureless tutorial you should be looking at something Doctor Moreau would truly be proud of!