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I'm unsure if I'm not following instructions correctly, or if a tablet computer just lacks the processing capability to do this without crashing every time, but I have a mesh I would like to turn into 1:1 scale PDFs (or some kind of format I can simply print without tweaking additional printer settings).

I've attempted to use the Paper Model add-on, but it throws up a warning about island sizes, due to the mesh being larger than a single A4 paper size. If I try to manually render with large pixel dimensions, the system just locks up and crashes.

The test file is linked here:

In the linked file, the round meshes are what I would like to print. I've added in a tile of A4 sized meshes for reference only.

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  • $\begingroup$ "Simply print without tweaking additional printer settings" not a very reasonable expectation. You always have to set the settings before printing since printers cannot guess what kind or size of paper you are using, what quality or size you want to print, how you want to order printed pages and so on and so on. There are hundreds of choices with most printers that cannot be done automatically, because printers cannot read your mind... $\endgroup$
    – Martynas Žiemys
    Commented Nov 2, 2022 at 7:42

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Paper Model add-on

Paper Model add-on takes care of everything automatically and you do not need to do anything unusual for this to work. You simply need to disable Automatic Scale and leave the default value of 1 to make it 1:1 size.

enter image description here

The addon saves a PDF file in the chosen standard size that you can then print. The file has exact standard dimensions so if its A4 for example, it's 2480x3508px or 209.97x297.01mm in 300DPI resolution. When printing, you have to make sure printer prints at actual size without fitting content to page, because it would shrink the document to fit within margins that are needed for most printers. It looks different in various printing dialogs of various different software, but you need to look for some scale setting and set it to actual or 100% instead of Fit to Page. If I wanted to print a PDF file that I opened in Chrome browser, that would look like this:

enter image description here

Printing scene size

If you wanted to print something 1:1 size as in your 3d scene, that's also possible. For real scale to make sense in a render, you need an orthographic camera, and set it's scale to the scale of the bigger dimension of your render resolution. So let's say I want to print A4 size. I need to set render resolution to it's pixel dimensions at my desired DPI resolution and set the camera scale to 297.01 mm:

enter image description here

The resolution of rendered image is 72 DPI by default so one also needs to fix that in some other program like Photoshop before printing since the dimensions in pixels are for 300DPI.

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  • $\begingroup$ The settings provided above give me an error about the mesh being larger than the render area. If I follow the plug-in suggestions of downscaling the mesh, it reduces the size saved on the PDF. I've gone with the other suggestion of manually cutting up the mesh to fit enough into the render area, then moving the camera one A4 paper's width or height to the next section.Though tedious, this seems to work, but the issue I run into is that the output file is in a random orientation. I won't be able to print out all 17 pages, and line them up square beside each other. Any way to stop that? $\endgroup$
    – hiigaran
    Commented Nov 2, 2022 at 11:00

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