What exports, if any, does blender have for 3d printers?
It may be sort of a list question, but I feel it could be horribly useful.
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1$\begingroup$ do you mean what formats? STL is the common. $\endgroup$– iKlsRCommented May 24, 2013 at 2:59
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$\begingroup$ Anything that satisfies printing on a 3d-printer would be sufficient for an answer. Formats usable by 3d printers or plug-ins that support a print button directly would be okay. $\endgroup$– RobotHumansCommented May 24, 2013 at 3:01
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2 Answers
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When considering 3d printing, you should be more concerned with your mesh topology than an actual output format. BlenderCookie has a tutorial on preparing a model for 3d printing. An application or company that does this will take anything from .ply to .obj as all these formats do is hold mesh data.
Here is also an extensive article on (recently new) official support for 3d printing in Blender.
So as for a definitive answer to this question. 3d printing giants Shapeways make mention of .STL in this tutorial
Finally, export to STL. When uploading the file, make sure to select "millimeters" for scale. If all went well, it'll upload, and you'll get notified that it's ready for printing.
and there is a set of tools called 3D Printing Toolbox available for Blender that assists with the overall process. Statistics/Cleanup/Export etc
You can enable the addon in Blender from the Mesh tab.
There is also a DVD on the Blender eShop on 3d printing. It is very modern and up to date.
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It may not have a print button, yet, though it is possible with OctoPrint/OctoPi servers and I'm getting close, very close...
That stated the features that currently work are designed for those that wish to quickly export selected objects as STL from Blender and then slice into GCode with either two different local slicers or one server based.
- Narrated video guides are within a YouTube Playlist, side note; yeah I know the audio is way low but at least the auto close captioning gets most of the words correct.
- Wiki is hosted on GitHub Pages and I'm also going through a bit at a time adding Doc strings to the source code too.
This is a third party addon for now, and under rapid development, but once available features & documentation are nearer to being complete it'll submitted to Blender for approval.
