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Units and Size: Understand your 3D Printing Dimensions
Introduction
Designing for 3D printing requires to keep in mind that your object will be a physical object with weight, size and constraints. Even if your object is coherent and seems to be at the dimensions you wish on the screen, it is really important to check if the 3D printed object will match your expectations and the machine constraints. Here are some tips to help you manage the units and size for 3D Printing with Sculpteo.
How to Choose a Unit of Measure for your CAD File
Whether you use the metric system or not, you need to know the exact size and dimension of your model.
Quite frequently, when you create a new file or scene in your CAD software, you are asked what unit of measure you want to use for this modeling project.
On Sculpteo the default measure unit set is the millimeters, but you can choose, before you upload your file, between Millimeters, Centimeters and Inches as unit of measure for your 3D print.
Be careful however because if you designed your model in centimeters in your CAD software, when you’ll upload it on Sculpteo and choose millimeters, your object’s unit of measure will be changed.
For example, a cube of 10x10x10cm will become a 10x10x10mm cube. That’s why it’s extremely important to choose the same unit on our platform as you did on your CAD software.
If you forget to choose the unit of measure before uploading your file, don’t worry! You can still do it afterwards.
In the 3D printing settings tab, under Review and Checkout, you can see a recap of the options you chose before placing your order. If the measure unit doesn’t match your CAD file settings, modify it. As you change the settings, the price will automatically adjust (as you can see on the image below).
Dimension, Weight and Size Constraints of a 3D printing
The 3D printing process observes some constraints depending on the material you choose and the associated 3D printer.
The weightof your model also plays a role in the price and the size of your object. A bigger object involves more raw material, which leads to a more expensives and heavy object.
To counter this effect, you can hollow your model in your CAD software or directly on Sculpteo with our automatic Hollowing tool.
You just have to place two holes on your model to allow the unfused material to be evacuated, your model to become lighter, and its price to be reduced in real time on the platform.
Modify the Size of Your 3D Printed Object
As you are going to transform a digital model (you CAD file) into a physical object (the 3D printed object), it is quite important to control the size of what you designed.
The method consists in using a measure tool on each part to check if the object is at the right size. Another technique is to create a cube you know the dimensions of outside of your model. When your object is inside of the cube, you obtain the approximative area occupied by your object in the machine’s tray.
As you can see, this method is slow and specific. To simplify the process, we decided to provide a scaling tool directly on Sculpteo that allows you to modify the global scale of your object and see the impact on the price.
To use that tool, you just have to go in the 3D Printing Settings and modify the scale values. The online tool scales the object proportionally in every axis to keep its proportions.
Be careful however to not oversize your object as it has to fit in the machine’s tray. A message will display if the object size exceed the machine’s capacity.
On the contrary, do not reduce too much the scale of your object as finest parts may not be 3D printed. Our online solidity check tool will verify if the thinnest parts could be printed or not and warn you about it. If parts of the model are too thin, our thickening tool could fix the issue directly online.
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