Cura & Sketchup

[EJP044 0]

Hey,

For school I'm busy designing shelters for bus stops. Only I already have problems by the basic design.

Cura designs an extra roof inside the shelter and I haven't designed this in Sketchup. How can I remove this roof?

You can see in the pictures there is no roof above the door frame in Sketchup, but there is one in Cura. It's also only visible in Cura when you activate the layer view mode

[ahoeben 1,990]

Sketchup is not a great modeling tool for 3d printing. It was not made with 3d printing in mind.

If you see a mix of white and blue walls in sketchup, that probably means you have one or more walls with 0 width, ie walls that only have a front face, but no back face. 3d printers cannot handle objects with walls that have no thickness.

[amedee 349]

If you really have a volume, but still get blue walls it means that the face is 'inverted' (inside out), and you can put it back the right way in Sketchup.

Having said that I second @ahoeben opinion about Sketchup.

I started with it years ago, because it has a nice learning curve and easy to use. I got nice models out of it at start, but when things get really complex you will eventually end up with unprintable models and all the time you invested in the design of that model will be lost.

Even if you pay attention to what you are doing you will get troubles soon or later:

 

• Units: Sketchup uses internally fixed precision numbers. I you work in real units (e.g. mm) you easily hit the precision limitation when you intersect objects.
  You can workaround this by upscaling you model (say 1m is actually 1mm) and print at 1/1000 in Cura, but it is not nice
  
• When you start playing with circles and tangents you will very easily end up with models that are not watertight and cannot be printed. You will spend hours to find where the leak is
  There are tools to fix that, but it is much easier to have it right at the start
  

 

There are other issues leading to non-manifold models, but these are the most common.

Sketchup is a great tool, mainly in architecture, but not for 3D printing...

(it is a bit outdated, but I like this chart...)

[geert_2 558]

You could try DesignSpark Mechanical as modeler: it is freeware (requires registration) from RS Components, and is actually a limited version of SpaceClaim.

Its method of direct modeling by pulling on things is the same as in SketchUp, so the learning curve is relatively low. And with a bit of searching, you can find several good instruction videos.

[EJP044 0]

Sketchup is not a great modeling tool for 3d printing. It was not made with 3d printing in mind.

If you see a mix of white and blue walls in sketchup, that probably means you have one or more walls with 0 width, ie walls that only have a front face, but no back face. 3d printers cannot handle objects with walls that have no thickness.

 

I already had that problem of no wall thickness, but I changed the walls first to 1mm and later as try to 2mm. That prints went good on the extra roof after.

[EJP044 0]

If you really have a volume, but still get blue walls it means that the face is 'inverted' (inside out), and you can put it back the right way in Sketchup.

Having said that I second @ahoeben opinion about Sketchup.

I started with it years ago, because it has a nice learning curve and easy to use. I got nice models out of it at start, but when things get really complex you will eventually end up with unprintable models and all the time you invested in the design of that model will be lost.

Even if you pay attention to what you are doing you will get troubles soon or later:

 

• Units: Sketchup uses internally fixed precision numbers. I you work in real units (e.g. mm) you easily hit the precision limitation when you intersect objects.

  You can workaround this by upscaling you model (say 1m is actually 1mm) and print at 1/1000 in Cura, but it is not nice

• When you start playing with circles and tangents you will very easily end up with models that are not watertight and cannot be printed. You will spend hours to find where the leak is

  There are tools to fix that, but it is much easier to have it right at the start

 

There are other issues leading to non-manifold models, but these are the most common.

Sketchup is a great tool, mainly in architecture, but not for 3D printing...

(it is a bit outdated, but I like this chart...)

 

Thanks for the chart, I will use it to find a new program