3D Printing and At-Home Fabrication Tips

I recently worked on a brick wall model  to use with the Resident Evil 2 board game.  I made the basic brick structure using the same sort of nested arrays that I used on the scales for my drakes , but that was going to leave me with a perfectly uniform brick wall.  I didn't want a shiny, brand new brick wall, I wanted a wall with some character.  I wanted a wall where the bricks had some texture, but I most certainly didn't want the same texture to be replicated over and over again on every brick.  So, I got creative. I first made a basic brick and arrayed it out, just like those scales.  That gave me a bunch of perfect, brand new bricks... so I just had to mess them up.  I applied my modifiers (something that I'm generally loathe to do, but couldn't be avoided in this case), then selected all of my bricks and pressed ctrl-J  to join them into a single object.  Then, I selected that object and went into sculpt  mode and went to work! ...

I've written a lot about using Meshmixer to generate support trees for 3D printing.  One of the folks over on my Patreon had a question that I hadn't really written about yet, so I figured that I should share what we came up with =) Meshmixer is a really cool piece of software that does a lot of great things.  One thing that it's not really good at though, is changing a support tree design after it's been saved.  This is understandable, as once a model has been exported with support trees on it, those trees aren't really distinguishable from the model itself; it's all just geometry.  So, when I'm working on a model, I usually just keep Meshmixer open until I get a good support structure worked out.  As long as it's still in the Analyze -> Overhangs mode, I can freely manipulate those support trees and do what needs doing! But, what do you do if you have saved the supported STL but then need to come back to it a few weeks later and make some cha...