Follow Along: Print Preparation

In this video, we will begin with our starter print preparation file that you can download below this video to implement the practices for preparing your part for a print discussed in the previous lessons. This begins with our sphere cube, which you learned in our nTop core as our sample part for this video. But feel free to also use other files that you may want to test this on by importing them, converting them to an implicit body, or even as a CAD or mesh file.

I’m going to first add in my printer information, and we can find those in our additive manufacturing tab. We have some examples of build volumes that we can work with, and I’m going to use the EOS m290 build volume. This is just a bounding box with the dimensions of that printer volume. So if you do not see the printer you are working with in our examples, you can also just search for bounding box and put in your dimensions there. I’m going to right-click and make this a variable, which I will label Printer Bounding Box.

I also want to define my build plane. So under build preparation, we have our Centered Plane From Box Floor and Corner Plane From Box Floor, and I’m going to choose Corner Plane From Box Floor, but you could really use either one. I place in my bounding box to determine where that build plane is, and that will be our printer bounding box. I will right-click and make this block a variable, and I’ll label this Build Plane. We can see if I turn off my sphere cube, it is right in that corner.

Once I have that part I want to print, I have my printer bounding box, my build plane. I can now think about how I want to orient my part. So the first option that we have, I’ll place my mouse, click right underneath that part orientation. And if we look at this build preparation, we have a couple options here as well. We have our Orient Object, which I’ll use first, and this is also really helpful if you’re taking our texturing course; this also is mentioned in that as well. We have Minimum Height Orientation as well, and in our beta tab, we have under manufacturing utilities, Minimum Support Orientations.

So let’s start with that Orient Object in that added manufacturing tab under build preparation. This will take in the object that we want to orient in a certain way, and that will be that sphere cube. So I’ll drag and drop that, and then I have my source plane and then my destination. So if we look at our sphere cube, I will type “I” to isolate and then “Z” to zoom in. I’m going to use a Plane From Normal as my source. So for this source plane, I want to have the minimum point of this box for this example to just place on to as my reference to place on to the build plane. So instead of having this origin, so that’s at the center, I want to make sure that no part of my sphere cube is underneath the build volume. So what I’m going to do is go into the block details of our sphere cube, into the properties and bounding box, and just choose that minimum point, and I’ll drag and move that.

So if I use this minimum point, note that this is actually not at that corner. This will make sure that my part is within that bounding box, but it will be slightly lifted up that bounding box. So if I wanted to have this plane right onto that part, I’m actually going to use the minimum point of the cube. So the reason that this is not right at that corner is if I open up my sphere cube, I have a blend radius of 2 mm. So this is just also increased that bounding box that we have of our sphere cube. So I’m just going to go into my cube in that sphere cube, go into those properties, and choose the m-point and replace that from the sphere cube. And now we’re going to have this at the minimum point that we want to work with, that minimum point of that cube.

So this is our source, and in order to place this on the destination, I just want to place this on the build plane. So I will drag and drop that build plane in here. And if I view my printer bounding box, let’s turn off that original sphere cube, we can see that now that minimum point of that cube is placed in that minimum location in that Corner Plane From The Box Floor. If I had used our Center Plane From Box Floor, I’ll place in my printer bounding box in that option, and we can just see that now it would be placed in that center. You could also use a different plane. You can type in that Plane From Normal as well, too. If we look at the properties, we can see where this is located, so at 125, 125, Z. You can place in your own values as long as that Z is zero, but I’ll just use our build plane that we have here. So this just changed the location of it, but if you wanted to change how this part was rotated, you could also change that normal. So for since this is just placing this on the build plane, but I could also choose the source plane to be a different way, we can see it’s been rotated.

If I do decide to just do a Plane From Normal, and maybe I do place in that 125, 125, 125, 0, and then decide I’m going to maybe have this lifted above my build plane, I could add in that higher value. 

I can rotate this at an angle. So, um, you have a lot of control with this Orient Object if you uh choose to use that. But I’ll place that build plane back in there. Another option that we can do as well that is doing a very similar process to Orient Object is under build preparation, we can use this Orient Body on Build Plane. So I’ll bring that down here and so what we’ll do is place that sphere cube in that body to orient. Build plane will be the same build plane we work with and then you can see you can also have this rotated and it will still stay above that fill plane. So I can put that rotation angle for 30 for instance or 45. I can change the rotation axis as well to get something like this.

Another option that we can use as well is our Minimum Support Orientation which is in our beta, as well as that Minimum Height Orientation. And I’ll walk through in our beta tab that Minimum Support Orientation. So if you don’t see this beta tab in your notebook, you’ll have to go to file, settings, and then in the general, we have that show beta blocks. So we’ll just click on that and then you should be able to uh see these beta blocks if you haven’t already. For the body that we want to work with, I’ll use the sphere cube. The build plane, same build plane we worked with before. Now we can also say we want a certain offset from that plane. So for instance, 3 mm above our plane, an overhang angle let’s say of 30°. You can also define your minimum or overhang angle and choose that you are going to consider supports in all regions, external only, or internal only. And I’ll just say external only and a feature size of one. So what this is actually doing is this is creating a number of orientations that will minimize the support. This is a transformation list that’s going to come out of this, and we can see that are five items in our transformation list. So in order to view these different options, I’ll first make this a variable. So I’ll right click, make variable and label this orientations because this is a transformation block. I have to place this into a Transform Object block. So this transform will go into here and then our object will be the sphere cube. Remember though, that this is a list, so we have those five different orientations. So if you transform this, it’ll do all five of those. But in order to best visualize each one individually, I’m going to use a List Element block. If you are unfamiliar with our List Element block, I do recommend when you’re working with lists or anything like that checking out our intro to automation course which will cover list as well as custom blocks. But I’ll use this List Element to take in my orientations and we can control which one we’re going to use. So our lists always start at zero. So we’re going to go to zero, and now we can visualize this here. Remember that this is at our corner plane from box floor. So this is going to be placed right at that center of the corner. So, you know, if you’re doing something like this and you don’t want to move this over, uh again, you would want to use that centered plane. We also can control, we can go to 1, 2, 3, 4, uh to determine which is going to be the best orientation for our situation. And that’s how our Minimum Support Orientations work. Our, if we go to our additive manufacturing tab under build preparation, our Minimum Height Orientation works in a similar way where we have this body, we have a transform, and we’ll place that into the Transform Object block.

Now that you’ve oriented your part in the way that you want, maybe you have a collection of parts that you want to print and place onto this build plane. So we’ll talk about that next in our placing part section. So I will make this Transform Object a variable since we’ll use this as one of our objects to place, and I’ll just label this minimum Min support orientation. And if we open up our placing part section, I have some of our primitives already in our implicit body list that we will place. So I have a sphere, I have a cube, I have a torus, and a cone. Now I have one option open, and that’s going to be our minimum support orientation sphere cube. So I’ll drag and drop that in there as our fifth item and then I can hide my part orientation. So if you have a collection of parts like this, all these different implicit bodies, what we can do is use our Bounding Box 2D Nesting which you can find in our manufacturing tab. So this is where we have our manufacturing support volume as well as our Bounding Box 2D Nesting. And it went into the part orientation section. So I’ll just drag and drop that there. This block will take in bounding boxes that we’re working with, as well as the build volume. So note that this is also a transformation list. So we’ll use this transformation into another Transform Object, and we’re not immediately putting in our implicit body list. We are only putting in those bounding boxes. So what I recommend is creating an implicit body list like this and then in our block details under properties, we have all five bounding boxes already as a list. I could also go individually, take this bounding box, add all my bounding boxes in here since this has this input of a bounding box list, but I already have that list. So I’ll delete that input block, go into the block details for our implicit body list, and drag and drop our bounding box into that bounding box option. For the build volume, that’ll be the printer bounding box that we have in our printer and part information. You can also control the part-to-part offset, which I will make 10 mm, so they have a little bit of space between them. You can also have a platform offset and a perimeter offset. And we had five items in our list. We now have five Bounding Box 2D Nesting transforms. So in order to see what this looks like, I will use our Transform Object block, place this in here, and know that this can take in an implicit body, a mesh, a CAD body. If we go into our block details and information, this is a spatial 3, so that really can be any type of object. So if you had a list of meshes, you could place that in here too. And now I’m going to take my parts, place them on that Transform Object, and we can see they’ve all been placed now onto our build volume. So to see what this looks like, I will also go into the block details of this Transform Object under properties and just drag our bounding box onto a separate line. So if I turn this on, we can see how this was produced, and we are organizing those parts to print in order of size. We have that largest and then we’re going to those smaller ones. So we have that 10 mm perimeter between those, and we are able to do this 2D nesting. So that’s how we can prep our part for printing, and next we’ll talk about slicing and getting the out of nTop to send directly to your printer.