THE ARCHITECTURE OF 3D PRINTING - 06 INTERIOR DESIGN

Stefania Dinea · June 17, 2018

I am Stefania Dinea, an architect who mixes 3D printing, VR, parametric design and blogging daily and I will share some of my 3D printing tips & tricks with you. This series is my overview about the process and my work-around. Please feel free to comment and add.

PREVIOUS POST:

THE ARCHITECTURE OF 3D PRINTING - 01 TOPOGRAPHY

THE ARCHITECTURE OF 3D PRINTING - 02 MASSING

THE ARCHITECTURE OF 3D PRINTING - 03 TOLERANCES AND SNUG FIT

THE ARCHITECTURE OF 3D PRINTING - 04 ENTOURAGE

THE ARCHITECTURE OF 3D PRINTING - 05 HIGH RESOLUTION BUILDING FACADES

6 INTERIOR DESIGN

BIM families are excellent however they have an issue, when scaled down they become invisible. Check these screen grabs from the unaltered revit model, and tell me – what’s wrong with this picture?

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So before you get started, might wanna have a look and see what you need:

Looking at the floor plan, we need some kitchen furniture, bathroom furniture, stairs, tables and chairs. Seems easy enough. The bad thing is if you are in the beginning and you have none of these, it will be a little time consuming to create the sets. But before you get cracking, you might want to check what furniture you can use. The Sofa Ottoman is a good example of keep.

However her big sister, has lovely little legs which will not do - 2 options, delete and lower the sofa, or delete the legs and extend the sofa with the height of the legs. I will go for option no.2

Same with the side table:

Remove the legs, and turn it into a cube would be my next step.

Might want to remove small objects like vases.

And also, start making your own solid families, like chairs - the ones existing in revit forums are not suitable for printing in such a small scale, the single extrusion will not be able to handle it. Even if you have a dual extrusion, you have to make sure the minimum width is kept.

Once you deal with all the furniture you want to illustrate, you go back to the same steps as before. Create a separate view, use a section box to enclose the area you want to print and then you have to make other decisions.

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So, you don't need to print to see the things you need to correct, importing the model into cura, will do just fine. In this case, i need to cut the model right under the floor and the decide if I want to keep the windows opaque or not. Personally I like to keep the opened, just the frame visible.

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First you play with the section box and adjust the level of the cut.

Even though you deselected the windows and curtain walls in the Visibility and graphics, you might want to make sure you hide them manually as well.

Although, sometimes, the exporters won't work as expected, so you might want to take the extra step and hide things from the exporter and or delete the glass in question from the family.

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This is the result in cura:

You apply this mentality for the whole house. Making custom furniture for the kitchen, bathroom and any other elements. Also you might want to consider that for this process you might want to use a 0.1 layer height and print at a lower speed to increase the quality. The examples I will attach below are printed at a high speed 100 mm/s and 0.2 layer height - and as you can see the model had a little bit to suffer because of it.

However all these models were printed using PVA and were printed on an UM3. The conclusion for me is that I have to tweek the settings a little bit more, a lower the speed. Also the fireplace printed but it came undone during the PVA wash so I have to revisit the reason why.

The reason why the fireplace came undone was because it was a floating element. This is the first time I encounter something like this so what would you do in a scenario like this?

When showing off architectural interiors first of all you only show the fixed furniture - kitchen, bathroom, and spaces like living rooms are usually unfurnished. However the question is, would you use furniture in these space? and if so, why?