Cool 3d printing time lapse video: multi-material, camera slider, etc.

[Eric]

This person’s setup is pretty unique, it looks to be a cheap (<$350) chinese printer but with Klipper firmware and the prusa MMU2 multi material extruder. Most interesting to me though is that they use a little tiny belt to purge filament between swaps keeping their timelapse videos nice and clean without a wipe tower of wasted material visible. The practical downside is that he probably has a pile of hundreds of short strings of filament next to the printer where the belt spits them out instead of a single solid waste tower.

 

[Andy]

So that's super clean, but I'm not seeing the belt that you're talking about. Are you saying that it just purges off into nowhere and dribbles off the print surface?

Also, this looks like it was done in blender, but I thought blender didn't work for 3d printing because it doesn't create solid structures. Is that right?

 

[Eric]

Doh! The belt purge thing is only visible in the live stream of the same print. It is much less satisfying of a video but you can see the MMU in the background switching filaments and and a small wheel below where the extruder parks:

âï¸ Purge wheel running on 3d printer

39 seconds · Clipped by Eric Sutter · Original video "Multicolor Mandalorian Bust 3D Printing LIVESTREAM [Klipper with MMU mod. Yet upgrade to ERCF]" by iczfirz

youtube.com

Blender can be used for 3d printing models but if you use a model not specifically designed for printing you do want to run it through netfabb or meshmixer or just prusaslicer (which has netfabb built in) and have it fix any holes or gaps. Blender can export Stl files though so if you ever want try organic modeling its clay sculpting tools can make it really easy to achieve soft round shapes that would be nearly impossible to do in CAD with significant complexity.

I am not sure what model they started with but they seem to be using blender to separate out the different colored parts into distinct models which is the cleanest way to do multi-material prints. They are going around and patching holes and fixing the model to be manifold manually and their slicer probably takes care of anything small they might have missed. Alternatively they could use Microsoft 3d builder or other software to paint the model into different colors which is probably slightly less tedius but might not make as nice of a timelapse video since youll see the insides and expose its “painted” color changes.

 

[Eric]

This is a great explanation of the whole manifold thing and has a link at the bottom to a blender 3d printing specific tutorial where they use a 3d printing extension to help fix some of the errors that happen going from a mesh to a solid model: https://www.sculpteo.com/en/3d-learning-hub/create-3d-file/fix-non-manifold-geometry/

I have found trying to understand what manifold means is pretty difficult outside of this context. Its a math term first that is describing this 3d model problem but boy howdy it’s math explanation is way over my head.