 Hello, so hello everyone. My name is Kiriakos. I am from Greece I live in Germany and I work in digital verxtot in Switzerland and Basel I have been working With Blender and professional 3d printing for about four years now and I'm here to share with you my experience and To give you an idea of the materials that can be printed at the moment and And while I was preparing this conference, I gathered a lot of new informations That helped me expand my knowledge and My goal through this workshop is to make you feel the same way To start I will Show you a table of some of the materials that can be printed at the moment But I will focus on the materials that they are being used most of the time And you have to think also that it's not only what we can print But also how we can treat the material after the print I will start with the most popular category and this is selective laser sintering or SLS This is working with a fine very fine powder that bond in the laser that the bonds and melts and The area that you have designed your model and this creating layers of about 0.12 millimeters And after a layer is finished a new layer spreads on top and the process is repeated until The model is ready the most known materials of this category first of all is polyamide that the Natural occurring polyamides are wool and silk which are nothing but proteins and While most common artificial manufacturer polyamide is nylon It's very good for functional prototypes. It has very good chemical resistance and It's good for medical prints like a prosthesis Next material is alumite is material is a mix of polyamide pea with Aluminium dust has a great color in metallic appearance It's suitable for parts that need machining and it's good for automotive and For models for example like a wind Tunnel test and next material is glass-filled polyamide is polyamide powder mixed with fiberglass For models that needs a much higher thermal thermal resistance and parts that they require a stiffness Next material is a TPU is a thermoplastic polyurethane. It's very strong and it's flexible It's something like this here And the best example that I can give you is that The new suit the new modified suits shoes from Madidas. They will print with this material Next material and one of the top of this category is carbon carbamide is a polyamide is a polyamide mixed with carbon carbon fibers and is a very good for Light and strong is a very light and strong material and it can replace metal and It is good for aerodynamic components in motorsport applications Now I will show you some projects that we make with some of this material Here you see a pump printed in one object without moving moving parts You can see a very good level of details Here you see a machine that is three meters long on the left that we cut it in pieces to fit inside the printer and On the left side you see a very nice level of details with polyamide Now this is alumite. This is a scan model It was about one meter seventy that we scan and This is in a scale of one to ten and has very really nice good details This is a combining alumite and polyamide the pink object is Polyamide that we paint it after the print Some problems that could occur Is that you have to avoid flat surfaces because of the heat that is being produced inside the printer You can have some small deformations like a wrapping effect And you have to avoid long objects with diameter of less than three to four millimeters because the object will not be Will not be straight Now moving to the next category is direct metal laser syntery or DMLS is working almost like SLS But the difference is that the materials that they are using is metal powders First material is steel that has a good machining and weld characteristics It has good mechanical properties and parts that require post-production processing Next material is aluminum Is a low weight with a good thermal properties And you can make a thin walls Complex geometries and suitable for aerospace and automotive products one of the top materials of this category is titanium That is characterized by having an excellent mechanical properties and corrosion resistance Is combining with low specific weight and the biocompatibility This material is suitable for many high performance engineering and of course for biomedical implants An example this is a tool that we print from steel and Small cylinders that you see in the middle is the weld Weld together after the print Some problems that could occur is Shrinkage that means that because of the heatness that is being produced inside the printer Your model maybe will be smaller from what you have designed. So you have to always keep in mind Next is that you have to avoid overhangs again for the same reason they will lose the form And you have to avoid angles less than 35 degrees because you will have the bad surface Next category is a stereolithography SLA is using an ultra wide curable photopolymer liquid that is spread on a platform The machine is using a UV laser that draw lines where your design is the liquid is becoming hard and The process is repeated Also support structure will generate Where where it needs Some of the materials is a Tusk XC 2700 T is a transparent material that is good for strong water-resistant prototypes and The specifications are like ABS material Next is a protogen is a white colored Photopolymer the specification again here are like ABS. It is very strong material with highly accurate parts And also sharp edges can be made with this material Next is a poly 1500 combined stiffness and toughness the specification of the material like polypropylene it is tough and flexible and Has a variety of application like automotive medical products and electronic and the last material is Extreme that has a good all-around properties And it's good for replacing mechanical parts like Parts that they have for CNC machines, and it has an excellent surface quality Some problems that could occur with these technologies that you have to avoid solid objects Because sometimes the removing the support structure can be very very difficult and also the machine will not work without a minimum wall thickness and You have to avoid direct sunlight because after one point you will have a small deformation On your product and it will be something like this this is This is a new model and this is after I think almost two years that has this yellow color Next category is polyjet now polyjet technology Jets and instantly UV cures a tiny droplets of liquid photopolymer The layers that are created here are almost zero point zero sixteen millimeters is a really high quality And in case of overhangs, then Britain will generate the support structure It is possible to print and combine more color and more harnesses If you see this Here is printed in one object and has different kind of harnesses and different kind of colors black and white in this model And also you can give a color to your model, but the color that you can give is You can choose from a color palette You can't give a color from a texture for example the palette is looking something like this First material is a very white is a white design With a great mechanical properties It is good for medical products small objects and with complex features and a variety of industrial applications And also the vero the vero products the vero family can be found in more than four hundred colors Next material is very clear It is a semi transparent material that is good for medical products I wear and artistic and the exhibition modeling Next we have tango black Rubber like design it is flexible and it can be found in different kind of harnesses This is a model that was printed with this technology and it has ten different colors Now some problems that could occur with this technology is that in case of more colors The designs can the design can be very difficult Because for each color that you need you have to make a separate file with zero tolerance Between the two objects between the two colors and this can be very very difficult Sometimes in in case of the model that you have We can create big size files Because of the very fine resolution that we have with this technology that means that you need more geometry and You need more this we can cause very big size files that sometimes you can't upload to a Company's website. I think is about 100 megabyte per website almost And next category is a binder genting that is an inject the printhead moves across a bed of powder and Selectively depositing a liquid of binding material a thin layer of powder is expressed across is spread across the completed section And the process is repeated Here we have color composite. It is a very fine powder mixed From Keramic and Gibbs is good for architectural Models and fast color prototypes, but also for models that they will they will used for preparation of a surgery We have ceramics is a food safe material With the heat resistance from almost 600 grads Now some examples This is a molecular Before removing the powder the support structure that you see under the model is For me to help me to remove it from the this step and take it to the next step that is removing the powder And here's the final model in full dimensions Now before some months, we had the opportunity to scan the first World Cup the FIFA World Cup And here you see the model in blend file and here you see the printed object that I have it here in the scale of One to two almost, but it has very nice level of details Here is a spine that we printed it was easy is one to one scale and We print for some doctors And here is here you see the same object in one some other angles It was very complicated this model to remove from the printer, but Okay, we make it The problems that could occur with these technologies that the the colors won't be the same like you have in your design I really don't know why this is happening, but I haven't found until now the the reason why is fragile comparing with other technologies and in case of a complex model that the powder of The powder can be very difficult and The remaining powder will be there like white spots And this is because after the model is infiltrated with the super glue The white the powder that they didn't remove properly. It will stack on your model and you will see like white colors Next category that is most popular almost is the fuse deposition modeling or fuse the filament fabrication The word of FDM belong to Stratasys so is a commercial word for FDM then word that Reprap is using is the FFF The printer heats the filament until a semi liquid state Then the nozzle extrude material According to the design and layer by layer the model is being done. Also the table has to be also warmed up Now one material is ABS is a thermoplastic polymer and the most important mechanical properties as our impact resistance and Toughness it is good for fully functionally prototypes Next material is a polycarbonate is a polycarbonates are a group of thermoplastic polymer containing chemical structure containing carbonate in the chemical structures and Is suitable for aerospace medical and many other applications One of the top material of this category is Ultham Is a thermoplastic that is a very very strong and Lightweight material and the most important is the heat resistance that is about 153 degrees and the best example that I can give you is that the new airplane from Airbus is using up to 1,000 pretty parts and most of them are Ultham Some problems that they could occur with this technology that's the support material can be very difficult to remove or really really painful sometimes and You have visible layers depending from the resolution that you want to print your model since sometimes you can see small gaps between the layers The last category is the lost wax casting How this works is first your model is being printed in a wax printer and after your model is covered from a Plaster mold that after the mold is dried the wax material is melted And like this we have our mold that The molten metal will insert after the metal is dry We break the model We break the mold and like this we have our Our model now not a lot of things to say about these materials We have gold silver bronze platinum brass and they can be found in different kind of finishing and in different colors some examples is here is a cross that is designed for my gold side is Gold red 14 karats of material And here is another project of mine that It was the material is a silver antique Some problems that could occur with these technologies that nested objects can't be printed That mean that if you have a chain or movable objects can't be made with this technology You have to avoid sharp edges because after polishing the model and you will have some issues And also you have to avoid Group group objects. This is in almost every category because you can't print group objects Now I will go to the second part of my presentation and this is a blender And How I am using blender for some of my projects I assume that everybody knows how to design a model in blender So I will focus on some of the functions some of the basic functions of blender for creating 30 printable objects the most known function and the most known problem of blender is the blender units You have to always think for printing is one blender unit is one millimeter and to show you an example of this is here I have changed the Units of my model to metric and I wanted My model to be 20 millimeters or two centimeters in this case And when I export my model and the import to the program that I'm using for color 3d print I have zero point two of something I don't know from where this is coming, but it's like this And if I leave everything default, I don't change everything and I treat my units like one millimeter I have exactly what I want. So this is 20 millimeters and this is what I want now Don't be day. Okay. I don't know this good. Thank you Now next important feature is the changing the dimensions When you change the my dimension is very very important that You have to apply the scale of the model This is very important because it will affect the modifier that you will use It will affect the UV unwrap in case that you have and it will affect maybe the export of your model Now To make this is not something special. You have to be in object mode by pressing ctrl a you can Reset or apply the scale of your model Very when you want To print a model it has to be watertight now in case that you haven't Designed your model to be printable from the beginning is a very good to modify that it will save you time And a lot of time it will save you money because some printers They are calculating the price with the object of the model and some printers from the material that they will use to print your model Now again, the most important feature of this before you apply the solidifies to apply the scale because here You see an effect that if I don't apply the scale I have this and after applying the scale is the dimension that I want or almost the dimension that I want because blender is telling you that you have to make one step more and You have to activate also the even thickness and the high quality and If I don't activate even thickness, I have a number of one point for one millimeter although I said that I want two millimeter and After activating I have the model that I want with the dimension that I want So always keep in mind to activate this option Another way to give Volume to give thickness to your model is by copying and scaling to the normal direction This is sometimes is a little bit difficult In case of the geometry that you have but it could be very practice Because it will give you more freedom This is easy to make you have to copy your model in edit mode and The press alt s to scale it to the normal direction, but also you have to keep in mind to Always on the bottom of the screen because you will have very very in more important informations like even thickness This will be it will be very very helpful now With this option a gap has been created and now I Will show you how to fill this gap is very important for a printable model that it will be free from gaps and free from holes from errors and You have some several options to fill this kind of errors first of all is the is the bridge tool and You have three options to To find this way to find this tool first of all is by activating the loop cuts Add on from the user preference second is the by using the quick tool add on from Jonathan Williams on that is an amazing add on that it will help you and it will save you a lot a lot of time and The third option is by inserting the by the edge preference Another way to fill holes is by With the fill option This is this will create a triangulate face between your object in case that you have caps or in case that you will have a hole to your object This also can be found in two ways or by pressing a alt F or by going to the face properties and choosing the fill The fill option this will not affect 100% the Will not affect 100% the printable model in case of course of how big your model is Next option is the grid feel This will create a very nice surface to your object and in case let's say that you have a sphere It will follow the form that you have But the only problem is that sometimes it will not work because it will say that you have to choose a two edge loops And in case that you have this problem you have to close the whole manually Or by pressing alt F or by pressing F by other ways now another option to give And You can have very very nice effects and here you see a model that we create is a lamp Made with blender of course and on the left side you see The printable object the prototype that we made with a with ultimaker I Will not analyze more this modifier because it's mostly for artistic modeling Now when you are filling holes and when you are filling the gaps is very important that You will see the normal direction of your model. This will create some problems In the printable object and the printer will not understand that you have an error And it's always good to check the normal direction and to see if everything is working correct now the Here is a problem From inverted normals. This is supposed to be a figure that we I took this file from a customer and I didn't check if this model has problems and I just put it inside the printer And I was very happy to see this after I didn't know what exactly was the problem until I opened the blend file And I saw that all the Normals were inverted were inverted. So always check for problems when you are taking files from other people. I Have it also here this Call a good thing Next important modifier is the Boolean modifier that it has saved me a lot of time When I want to make some operations and And You can make union you can make difference you can make intersect But the most common Frequent reason that I'm using the Boolean modifier is to to fit my model inside the printer now to make this It's depend from the printer that you have of course because you have different kind of dimensions in the printer to make this you have to create a Plane that is bigger from your object and Place it to the to the position that you would like to cut your model then copy your model place it to another Layer is very important this Choose a design a more Boolean modifier with intersect or Different it doesn't matter which one will go first and Then with a copied model Assign the opposite the opposite operation that you choose from the other one again you have to Copy your model and save it to another layer so you will have always a backup Now some examples of this This Boolean operation is here you see an architectural model That in reality is a 450 millimeters and I had it to print it in color 3d print and The dimension of the color 3d print is a 380 millimeters So I had it to cut the model in two pieces and I also here created some unions to be to be more stable and here is the Printed object with full-color material now Another example This is a figure that we scan And we wanted to print this with polyamide it had it to be Unfortunately in two pieces because the maximum size of polyamide is 700 millimeters So this figure is a one to two scale And we had it to cut them the model in the middle. I Also created some Unions to be more stable and here you see the printed object some of the printed objects now the One other example is this topography There is one meter 50 centimeter long And I had to cut this model in six pieces to fit inside the color 3d print and The material that you see in the middle is a stereo lithography Technology and it was printed in transparent material in one piece And now I will show you an example of boolean operation and how you can use the to polluted technology Here I have this Molecular that I had it to print it with polygent and like I told you for its color you need the separate file So for the red yellow blue was not such a big problem because I had it only to make them separate and close the holes That were created but the problem was the molecular in the middle the spheres and These fears were overlapping each other and to create a separate file from each This of these spheres and with zero tolerance. I had to create a boolean to assign a boolean modifier With most of the time difference and my main object was the gray color that you see and After the boolean modifier its sphere was looking something like this. It was a little bit to complicate to make and another important issue that you will have with color 3d print mostly and a way to Give a solution to this problem is that when you are taking when we are scanning a file Sometimes we are taking geometry a lot of geometry and unwanted geometry Although here in my blend file, you don't see any kind of errors when I printed my object I had this black spot on my printable object and I didn't know from where was it is coming now if you go to wireframe And make a zoom in you will see in geometry that is not attached to somewhere and Of course and no text were captured from this technology and that mean from a from this from the scan So that means that the printer gave a black color And that it was printed together now To fix this problem you have the linked and invert option and To make this you have to choose a face from your printable object Press L to make link all the object that you would from the printable object And then by pressing control I to invert the selection You will select these errors and then by deleting the object you will be free from this kind of errors now the One of the most important modifiers of course is a subdivision modifier What is making is giving a lot of geometry to your to your to your model make it it's smoother and But the problem is that it can create Unwanted geometry and sometimes in in case of the material that you want to print is Unnecessary to subdivide so much time your model now to give you an example of this Subsurf modifier again with the same molecular here is the model that I used for the binder printer is you can see the polygons that very clear and Although in this case the polygons are a 0.3 to 0.6. Millimeter And it was smooth enough for the binder printer and here you see the project printer that that needs much high geometry and In this case here you see that the One polygon is 0.05 to 0.1. Millimeter at length Is a very accurate this technology, but what is the area the reality is that with binder printer? I have 70 almost 70,000 vertices and the 6.6 megabyte of size and with polyjet I have almost 6 millions vertices and The size of 564 megabytes that if you want to print this from In the to upload in a company's website. It will be very very difficult and the reality is This binder jetting you see that is a very smooth although I had less geometry Although in the sphere I could go one level more of subsurf and Here is the polyjet printer very high level of details Now some tips for color 3d print and You have three options to give a color you have the texture color you have the material color and You have the vertex color Now like everybody knows with texture color you have to UV and wrap your model It doesn't matter how but it might have to be to look nice and Attach a model Material to your model that has this texture the texture can be photo or can be Texture that you created with the texture paint and Here you see a model that has six textures attached to this Model Next is a material color is very easy. You just give material to your Model you choose a color that you would like to have and also you can have more materials attached to say to separate the polygons Now the vertex color is you are more creative or also with more geometry you can have more colors and You have to go to vertex paint of course to paint the vertices And here is an example My model is blue and inside you can find some orange, gray and yellow spheres the molecular and Now we go to the topology of the model You have to avoid holes because some printers will create some errors You have to avoid inverted normals because of the example that I saw you before You have to avoid to duplicate Geometry this is very very important because sometimes the printer will not understand the error and will print and you will have some Strange effects. Most important is that you have to avoid the niggons Because after you export your model it will be Translated to triangulate face and this can cause some strange faces that may be unwanted Now if you have quads or triangles, it doesn't really matter Because it will be a triangulate after the export Now you have to always use the 30 printing tool is very useful You can have some you can find a lot of errors, but you have to think also that in case that you are working with a Big size files with millions of vertices if you press the check call control it will take forever until blender crash and What I'm using most of the time is the solid object the solid option that I want to know if I have holes or inverted normals That this is the most important that I need now if I have overhangs It doesn't really matter because the printer will generate the support structure alone Now some things before you export the model You have to make a backup is very very important Save your model with all the modifiers so you always know that you have a safety file Apply the modifiers to see if the effect that they you want is exactly this a Triangulate the face to avoid niggons Make a final review of your of the model see if everything is working correct now export your model and After exporting the model import it again to see if everything is correct That means that maybe you forgot to apply the scale Maybe you wanted to export with texture UPS, but you export with vertex color So you always have to import to be sure that everything is working Working like you wanted Now to export your model you have with blender for possibilities is STL That is the most common one then you have your ML to OBJ and you have the PLY the three last one is With the color informations now to To print STL to export like STL you have to choose the model that you want is very important and By giving a name and exporting you will have the file that you want But if you don't choose the model you will have one kilobyte file with nothing inside So it's very very important to choose the model that you want to export The next is VRML to that is the best format to export the model with color informations You have to activate always the selection only object Option so you will export only the opposite that you wanted to be exported and Also, you have to it's depend from the code from the way that you have given color to your model You have to activate texture UVs or vert vertex color for material or for vertex paint The problem with the VRML to is that you can export only one texture. This is the only problem here You see the I have three texture attached to the sphere and when I import it to the color three different program I have only one texture attached And unfortunately there is the only way to export your model with multiple textures by exporting both with OBJ But also this will create some other problems because you have to have a program that will translate this OBJ format to a ZPR format and Not everybody has this pro this translation program unfortunately, and it's not an open source program You have to activate also these options for the OBJ format Now in conclusion, I will not repeat the same things that I already told you but I Will show you a workflow that I'm trying to follow when I Design a model to to print and First of all is the customer idea In this step you have to take as much information as you can If it is possible to know the budget of the material object, it would be very very useful for you You have to know the time scale How much time you need to print the object? How much time you need to design and also you have to have extra days for the production that means that some times the printer can Stop working and that's mean that you have to postpone the production time And so you have to have always extra time You have to think also the size of the model that you want to print because this Will give you some details of the final printed object And also how many details you can give to this object now, of course is the material and technology that you will print the And and after these four steps take place Your design take place and also you will know the how many level of details you can give to your model Next step is make a final meeting with your customer Give some details take a feedback to avoid some problems And if everything is going good you have a production time and Everyone is happy so Thank you very much for your time Hope was everything good In case that someone has questions I'm here. I don't understand exactly the question I don't know something for HP is the truth. I have been working with Stratasys and you have some It's very stable is the truth. I haven't seen any kind of Problems with this material But everything is depend from your design So I really don't know Which kind of errors can be? Yeah, don't need. Okay. I don't know this You have a different kind of post processing It's depend from what you want to make I have heard a lot of people that make with a set on that you can create a very nice surface You can make different kind of things you can place it in an oven to be a little bit more smoother, but yeah and From my experience haven't used this format. I normally use for for color 3d print via ML 2 Because it's taking all the information and also I have the possibility to import direct to the printer Because some of the format like OBJ you have to have another program That it will export your model to a ZPR format and it ported to the printer. So with this Format, I don't know. I haven't used Okay