3D Printing TutorialJoey Ingrassia

My goal here is to repurpose and edit a public .stl file to be 3D printing ready. I used a few tutorials (as I find that not one had everything that I needed) that aided me in this endeavor. I will do this in the program SketchUp. The video game enthusiast that I am, I found a file of a miniature Keyblade from the Kingdom Hearts franchise to edit and prepare.

Ideally, it will look something like this.

Download screen. The file was only about 80 MB, or less than 1/10 of a Gigabyte.

Start up screen. Here, I chose what type of project to do. Obviously, I picked the one that had 3D in the title.

Ah, this screen took up about 45 minutes of frustration. The program froze about 12 times. That (Not Responding) still haunts me.

Truly the bane of my and my computer’s existince.

Finally! The program accepted my .stl file into the system. Don’t see it? It’s that itty bitty little guy at the bottom of the box.

1 hour in, and it’s finally starting to look like something I can print.

So I stumbled around for about 10 minutes trying to find a way to change my view, too proud to look up directions. I’d like to say that I figured it out on my own… I’d like to…

Leave it to Disney to ruin anything cool that they produce with shameless advertising. Now I got to figure out how to delete part of a .stl file. Should be easy enough.

NOPE! NOT EASY! I go to click some of the lines and shapes to delete, and they all get selected. I want to select a bunch of them, and only one gets picked. This took WAY longer than I want to admit. At least now it ready to be printed.

Links to Tutorials Used

• http://wiki.ultimaker.com/Using_SketchUp_for_3D_printing

• http://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/sketchup-stl

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STOvoOaxHTQ