Posts

Showing posts from February, 2020

Using PrusaSlicer to Design Tree Supports for FDM Prints

Image
I've done a lot of work with tree supports in Meshmixer .  I don't want to denigrate the awesome utility that Meshmixer brings to the table, but it also hasn't been updated in two years.  Meanwhile, Prusa forked their version of Slic3r into PrusaSlicer and has added a bunch of support for MSLA printing... including tree supports!  And, they obviously paid a lot of attention to how tree supports are designed in tools like Meshmixer, because the PrusaSlicer interface neatly bypasses just about all of the pain points that I have when working with MM!  The one drawback is that the Tree Supports are only officially available for MSLA printers... but there's an easy way around that! In order to use PrusaSlicer to generate support trees, you need to change to one of their supported MSLA printers.  At that point, when you slice your model, it will automatically generate support trees that are tuned for that MSLA printer.  These automatically placed trees are a really good st

Building Buildings

Image
I've been working on my King of Tokyo proxy models for a while now, which has meant that I've needed a bunch of buildings to put onto the bases for the various Kaiju to rampage through.  Rather than building each of these buildings by hand, I put together a system of arrays to do it for me.  Since I'm rather proud of how it all comes together, I figure that I should go ahead and write about it here! So, let's talk about how it all works.  First, here's the meat of the "city building" collection that I use (for those of you on the Patreon, that's the actual name of the collection where I keep all of this stuff in my King of Tokyo files, if you want to look at it in Blender).  As you can see, there are several partial buildings there, as well as some random bits on the right.  It's a bit harder to see, but directly in front of the left-most building, there are three bezier curves (although each is a straight line), running parallel to the world axe