Alex L

Totally agree that white is used due to the lack of commitment to colours it affords. This means you can present massing to clients, planners, the public etc without having to have more detailed ideas about materials. Also, if you cannot realistically represent the material in the chosen materials of your model it is best not to try as it will end up looking childish and cartoon-like. Colours are best used to define key buildings within a site or a key element of a model such as a new-build extension on an existing building, as Stefania said. We are nearly though our first spool of white PLA so we will be looking to get more of the same but probably some matt finished filament too to give that a go. Our other office who got a printer a couple of years ago have said that the white PLA is by far the most trouble free for printing with - the silver metallic can be a bit prone to print problems like delamination and poor bed adhesion under default settings apparently.

Amazing tips and tricks again Stefania, thanks for this and you have given me the solution to the tricky Curtain walling/glazing issues when printing these from archiCAD. I will try with a mass inside the building when I get a chance.

I swear by Dimafix four our PLA prints to date. Works great and self releases once the bed cools down. Requires nothing more than a quick rinse under the tap to remove all traces of the adhesive.

I did one with a PVA raft and one with the man stood up with the support structure wrapping around it. The support structure was much much bigger then the figure itself with a 6mm perimeter all around with no brim. |The PVA support ended up very messy but it did the job. I think if I printed this without the PVA I would certainly need a brim at the very least to stop it from falling over. Might give it a try without the PVA as it says it will only take 2 mins to print.

This was printed (as were the tweezers) using the 0.4 print core. We have not yet tried using our 0.25 core. This was printed with PVA support and using the 0.06 extra fine extrusion height. I would imagine that this has helped twofold: The pva allows for a greater structural support for the model reducing the risk of it distorting or breaking off the build plate whilst printing (as well as allowing the arms to be printed with relative ease) The time take with each layer to print the PVA allows the previously laid plans time to cool without the need to print a purge tower or similar. It is by no-means perfect, the resolution is pretty low at close inspection but if you are using this for context on a 1:200 model I don't you'd notice the fuzzy edges! I might have to give him a go using our 0.25 core to see what difference that makes...

Yeah, I'm starting to feel pretty glad that we are ArchiCAD based the more I experiment! Yes, he's an ArchiCAD object exported to Cura as a 1:200 .STL file. Printed as a fine model with PVA support, I think he would snap off without, not to mention the difficulties with the arms. Here is the STL file if you want to have a play with it. test human.stl You can see the level of detail which is ignored by the printer. He could do with being stood on a plate or tower for proper integration into a model.

Great post Stefania. Time to possibly make you jealous again. Archicad objects seem to be pretty 3d printer friendly. Here is a 1:200 person, I wouldn't generally add people into a model any smaller than 1:200 as they tend to be for massing only. Trees are fair enough but people look a bit insignificant IMO. Trees will also come out of archicad into Cura with no problem, although I haven't printed one out yet as I'm short of time. Really looking forward to your post on facade detail.

Not being familiar with Revit I couldn't do a fair comparison but it is very easy in ArchiCAD, we made a very simple site as a quick test. We didn't use any tolerance in ArciCAD instead scaling the insert by 0.5mm on the X and Y axis, leaving the z axis. Admittedly this is cheating but at the scale we printed the distortion to contours created is not noticeable and for real sites Stefania's tolerance method is probably better by allowing an increase in site size. Archicad doesn't require any cheats to get meshes to work in Cura and a simple solid element operation created our site recess you can see the imported meshes below ()obviously the insert needed to be printed separately if you are using our cheat by scaling the horizontal size of the insert (OK on a test, probably not so good on an actual building!) Below you can see the printed objects (excuse the silver PLA - not very architectural!) With regards to detail; there becomes a point as you suggest where detail is too small to print, often Cura will remove these bits. Generally a model will need a bit of tuning before printing, or else generating with 3D printing in mind, I have not yet go to grips with curtain walling out of archicad, this is my next task!

Ok, here it is! Printed over 22 hours using 'Fine' settings in Cura with no support just to see what would happen. Pretty pleased with the result, the balconies have ended up looking ok even when printing in thin air. We will run one on fast soon to see how that changes everything.

Does it need to be draw on the mesh though? just the ability to draw polylines on the build plate grid which extruded up through space would be perfect. But I know nothing of the complexities of programming! Maybe in a few years it can be Christmas for us all...

Ah, got it, thanks, does this actually do an equivalent of support blocking though? does'nt it just stop support areas from joining different models together? Do I need to tell it not to print one of the meshes somehow? Sorry for all of the questions, this is very new and exciting for me!

Where does this live? I can't seem to find it...

Love the support blocking function but for my applications it is often desirable to block support from large areas which are often irregularly shaped so placing, scaling and rotating the blocking volumes is time-consuming. What would be awesome would bt the ability to draw a poly line which would allow for exclusion of support structures in the area outside the poly line. does that make sense?

The good news for ArchiCAD users is that mesh exports straight into Cura with no need to use any 3rd party software.

I guess the most important thing for us would be how to best prepare a model for export as an efficient .STL file - Things like curtain walling seem far too complicated for Cura (when opening in Sketchup they are made of many many surfaces and Cura fails to read this as an element which it can slice properly) So it would seem things like this need tuning to simple solids before exporting. You should definitely give it another try (not everyone is moving to Revit! ), it is getting more like sketchup and now has integration with grasshopper which is pretty exciting - I just need to keep playing with it to get the best out of Cura. Which isn't always easy when running live jobs. I will give printing meshes a go over then next couple of weeks and let you know how I get on.

Please do not be putt off by what one old Architect thinks (mostly incorrectly from my point of view!) I value your input and am glad to be working in a practice where we see the use of 3D printing. Our small massing models are loved by our clients as they represent an easy way for the layman to understand a scheme. Completely agree with your response about time saved. One of our offices conducted a massing model experiment where we pitted 3D printer against hand modelling: the 3d printer won on both time and quality! My only issue is that we use ArchiCAD not Revit so if anyone here has any helpful hints and tips for this it would be greatly appreciated, if not I guess I'll have to get to grips and share my experiences too

Ah no, we never sent the cura file to the printer, all saved away, I should have said 'on hold' apologies for the confusion!

All paused for now whilst we wait for approval from our insurers to run the printer out of office hours Will let you know how we get on once we are given the all clear!

Thanks for the reply @Stefania Dinea Yeah it's just the angle the screen grab is taken at. Ideally the model would be amended to omit balconies at this scale but we are tying to do a comparison print against another office's Ultimaker original so have replicated their settings entirely (the balconies on their print are malformed blobs as is to be expected but we had hoped that with PVA the results might differ slightly

Thanks @SandervG I'll try downloading the beta version of Cura and see what this does to the print times

Just got our lovely new Ultimaker 3 up and running and we are tying to print a massing model which has balconies, seems like the perfect use of the PVA support material but Cura does not want to support the balconies without placing PVA support almost everywhere as the attached images. Is there some setting to stop it printing PVA where it is clearly not needed?