So, you made a cool project and you want to get it printed on a high-end 3D printer that captures all the details of your sculpt.
Because these printers print your models completely solid, your prints might require a lot of material which quickly increases the price to a point that you are having doubts of having it printed.
With this simple 4 step tutorial I’ll show you how you can very easily bring down the amount of material required to print your model by hollowing it out!
You’ll need a free copy of Meshmixer, if you don’t have it, you should get it here:
http://www.meshmixer.com/
Believe me, you want it, it’s a great little tool that is capable of doing incredibly complex operations.
Now, the tutorial itself:
- Load the Model → click “Edit” → click “Hollow”
2. Then select how thick you want the walls to remain, in this case I was planning on printing on the Form 1+, so 2 mm was good enough for me.
3. Before accepting, make sure that you add some holes to your model by double clicking the surface of your model where you want the excess material to come out of. If you misplaced a hole, you can easily remove it by double clicking the little red globe in the middle of the green cylinder.
4. Now, simply click “Accept” and you’re done, it’s that easy!
Now the difference between material amounts before and after!
Original model
After hollowing
Finally, I do want to add that I added internal supports just to make sure the entire print would work out correctly so the final volume turned out a bit higher then 20.0 mL
I hope this tutorial was useful to you guys! Here is the final result:
