Ship Model Carvings and figureheads - Using AI for for making STL files for 3D printing...things are getting better every day.

[g8rfan]

Thanks Greg for the explanation. It was on Meshy 6. I'll give the Meshy 4 a try and see what happens. It's only $15 a month and they give you half off the first month, so cheap enough to try if Meshy 4 doesn't work. 

[KennyH78]

Switched gears and decided to try to tackle the figurehead for Confederacy.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and will be attempting to print it soon.  First I need to find some resin that is tan/wood colored.  All I have at the moment is gray and black.

 

I ended up using the picture of the figurehead from Chuck's tutorial on how to sculpt one using polymer clay (first pic).  The second pic is what meshy 6 had generated and the third pic is of the model in LycheeSlicer.  

[Kevin-the-lubber]

Really interesting thread, amazing how quickly Meshy has developed and I suspect it may allow me to duck the learning curve for Blender that I’ve been putting off since forever. The thread touches on many things relating to 3d and I hope my 2 cents worth around some of these are helpful;

 

I have several resin printers, all of them Elegoo. No particular reason other than price, consistently good reviews and good personal experience. Like you, Chuck, I have three machines constantly on the go. I now use the Saturn 3 Ultra because I don’t like the complexity or cost of the tilting vat of the ultra 4, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. For those thinking of buying a printer, it’s worth looking on eBay for good used models, as a toe in the water. The qualitative difference in prints from my Mars bought 5 years back and my Saturn 3 Ultra’s is so negligible as to be largely irrelevant, and you can pick up a good used printer for £50. Don’t touch anything that needs a new screen, nor anything that has resin all over it. I use wash and cure machines to do a three-wash routine, and would recommend them, but each to their own. I absolutely don’t and won’t run resin printers in my office; they are in my workshop, where I have fume extraction etc. I learned that the hard way a few years back, hospitalised with pneumonia. A tip for those in colder climates: a heated cabinet is invaluable. Resin doesn’t print well below about 22/23 degrees C. 

 

Slicers: I mostly use the original Chitubox free version, because it gives me wireless connection to the printers, which the newer version doesn’t. But I also use free or included-with-purchase versions of Voxeldance, Lychee and Elegoo’s own slicer Satelite, as and when I think that’s the better tool. Some of these have Boolean functionality. I don’t use that because I’m fairly adept with F360. If you are using Boolean in a slicer, you can use the dimensions function and ‘move’ tool to position the objects precisely in relation to each other.
 

Does 3D printing turn it all into a ‘press the button and sit back’ thing? No. I’d bet my shirt that anyone reading this is not the type of person who buys a model kit and has it painted and assembled inside a month. We all like to bash, scratch, embellish, get creative. A 3D printer is just your own, personal, pseudo-injection-moulder. You’ve still got to make everything work as part of your build. The meshy outputs are a case in point. As impressive as they are, you could still spend hours and hours improving them, either on the software side or the printed output. Not so different to plastic kits. Besides which, I may be wrong but I don’t think it’s yet possible to generate an STL from meshy with the dimensional accuracy we mostly work to. So, it’s really, really good for organic shapes but perhaps less so for precision engineering.

[KennyH78]

Kevin, I have agree with 100%. I own 2 FDM printers (both from Elegoo) and 1 resin printer (Anycubic Photon Mono 4 the I received for X-mas last year). There is a learning curve on these machines as well as the periodic recalibration of the print beds and other settings. But on the flip side, 3d printing can become an addictive hobby on its own, and they can be invaluable tools for model ship making. 

[Kevin-the-lubber]

3D design and printing can certainly turn into a big rabbit hole, but I suspect you probably need to be inclined towards rabbit-holing anyway. I think the learning curve for resin is long and gentle, as you’ll get good prints right out of the box. Most of the learning is about making good prints great I.e designing for printing, object orientation, print supports, and using all those settings that are mostly ignored. Printers are marketed like sports cars, the emphasis is always on speed - but like many cars, printers perform better if you just slow down!