Not the most showy topic/video but one that is really important to understand if you want to 3D print from Blender without getting annoyed. Hope you find it helpful!
WOW!!!!! I wish I had discovered this video two years ago! Better late than never. I work in mm and use the Boolean tool a lot, cutting out tiny little things. I tried the technique of choosing mm and changing the scale. My booleans are not happy campers with that approach. This video is the best I have come across in explaining how Blender dimensions work. Thanks for making it easy to understand and for making me laugh. My country is still working in Imperial Measurements, and it drive me crazy, so like a lot of folks here, I have just started working with metric. For goodness sake try adding 1/16 + 3/64+ 5/8 or even worse having to convert to the decimal versions and adding 0.0625 ..... It is nuts
One of the first things I changed in my defaults was units to mm, scale to 0.001 and grid to 0.001 - had no issues with blender, various slicers and other design software.
Agreed, I followed a tutorial (I think one by Maker Tales, he has a few now.) on how to set the view and scaling to mm for precision modelling and never had any issues with clipping or weird rounding during booleans and certainly never had to mess with scale during or after exporting. Oh, I have one tip for people setting up their default view: I added 2 wireframe boxes in a separate collection. Each one is the build volume of my printer; one for my Mars, one for my Neptune. I then set them to hidden and save my default view file. It means I can very quickly check that models will fit in the build area and give a IRL scale reference. It does make it doubly important to tick the "Selection only" when exporting though or you just get a big block. Adding another mesh for scale comparison for a 28mm mini might be handy too, there have been times when I've spent a long time adding detail for it to be too small to even print, let alone be noticeable once printed.
@@ArtisansofVaul I'll also just take a moment to thank you all these videos though :) I started trying to pickup blender a couple of weeks back and so many tutorials have them using tools without saying how they activated it, using addons without saying what the addon is, using menus that appear different due to addons etc... Your videos are not only the exact subject I want to use Blender for, but you also never use a tool without naming it and saying how to activate it, never use an addon without saying what it is and where to get it etc.. I actually feel pretty confident in Blender now and it's entirely due to the videos you made. So... many thanks :)
@@MartinJamesLittle I'm hoping to do a little something that you might find interesting about this suggestion. I had the idea watching a video on something else and thought it might be applicable for 3D printing design. I just need to check if it works.
I couldn't figure out why the top layer of my models in the slicer would have weird artifacts. I then noticed they went away if I scaled my blender model up by 1000. Now I know why that worked. If only I had seen this video a week ago. Thank you very much for covering this at least after all that pain I have a rational explanation now.
*Converted to Blender units!* Thankyou so much! I only work in mm and it's now perfect. I'd messed around with changing scale and units to 0.001 etc. but some addons only work in meters when set to mm. Even bolt factory and punchit works properly now! Brilliant! Orca slicer gave a slightly annoying "do you want to convert to mm on every import" and even that's gone. Love the "I'm not a savage" comment! I worked for two American companies before I retired - the last one made things in the US and bought components in causing me to I travel Europe with two lots of tools and some were tiny allen keys I had use fully suited, masked and gloved... grrr... Bloody excellent. Cheers!
This is very helpful to know. I have worked in Blender for years and never knew why this happened. Thanks to this video I can understand how to not have the itty bitty problem when importing to slicers. Awesome and thanks :)
No worries at all. It took some trial and error to work out for sure including some test printing to be certain. But I thought it was useful knowledge to pass on.
I've never had any problem working in mm. It's floating point numbers, so scaling by 1000 doesn't affect the precision even though blender tends to truncate the lower digits on display. I've also not had to worry about the scale, because STL files don't have units anyway, so every program I use assumes they're mm. Maybe your one slicer is confused and you think that's why importing things is a problem. And of course if you're doing something like a cloth simulation to create a minifig's clothing, you need it in the right scale for the simulation too (where "right scale" would be making the minifig several meters tall). I probably haven't done as much as you, but I never noticed blender crashing or anything like that, and I just set my far clip-plane to maybe 100 meters instead of many kilometers away when I'm working in millimeters. I'm loving binging this channel. So much good info here.
I'm glad to hear you don't have any issues with it and Blender has apparently done things recently to help with it. So the issue with the scale definetly happens in 3D builder and its such a helpful tool to give a mesh a final check I pretty much always throw everything into it first. It can be overcome in a variety of ways but this just tends to be easiest/more reliable. But if you don't experience it as an issue then no need to change anything😉👍🏻
@@ArtisansofVaul I will keep that in mind. I find that PrusaSlicer can send the model to autodesk to fix it without having to have yet another set to it, so I haven't needed it. But it's good to know it's there. Maybe it is newer versions of blender after all, too. Oh, I also tend to save my STLs as ASCII. I wonder if that makes a difference.
Brilliant! Thanks for this vid. I'm just starting out with Blender and 3d printing and the whole 'blender scale' thang was pissing me off. Especially when I add a new object to scene or fiddle around with grids.
this worked like a charm, thank you so much! I made the mistake of turning the original file I was workin on into mm and was very puzzled when it looked microscopic in size on lychee
Really interesting video, thanks for making it. Most of my work is exported as an stl for a CNC machine, which-like 3D printers-deals with mm as the base unit. I've never had a problem with working in mm in Blender, but have had to remember to scale models up and down as appropriate when switching to and from 3DCoat or for final export. Setting Blender's units to 'none' might be a nice simple way to simplify that part of my workflow. 👍👍
I'd be really interested to hear how that turns out for you. I don't have experience with CNC machines/software so it would be good to know if anyone else asks.
@@ArtisansofVaul No worries, I'll let you know how it goes. Am working on a few on-going projects at the moment, but I'll give it a test on the next new one.
@@ArtisansofVaul Just an update... I've now switched over to using 'none' as the scene units for all my projects which will be machined on a CNC machine. It has greatly simplified import and export of objects, as well as jumping between Blender and 3DCoat. Great tip. I'm glad I watched your video.
Awesome video like always! Are you by any chance planning to follow this up with a video explaining your process to 3d print objects, choosing the settings you use (especially for supports) for the slicing?
Thank you, I was getting suspicious about the dimensional errors occuring whilst working on small parts in mm, looks as though no units is the best option for me.
This video explains why I'm experiencing a number of strange issues. Especially when it comes to the 3d Printing tool and errors. If I make anything very small, the tool spits out Zero Faces ans Non Manifold. But, the moment the object is scaled up, the errors evaporate. May test later to see if switching scale helps with this issue.
I'd argue that scale and size is always important. Even when you're doing things like still image renders; the way lenses and rendering optics work in the raytracer especially are dependent on the scale and measurements. If you're modeling a miniature/model, then the proper scale is the actual scale you want it printed, of course. But if a spaceship is actually 2km long, make it 2km long if you intend to use it as a render model. You'll just get better results in so many places. Scale it later if you decide to print your 2km spaceship (but you'll probably need to re-model it anyway to fix detail scales). That being said, the Blender thinking meters and everything else thinking mm is annoying. Blender has a built in Unit Scale feature which I've toyed with, but I don't think I tested importing into Lychee. I'll see how that works on a model I'm working on. Edit: Okay, right off the bat, switching units to 'none' and Unit Scale to 1000, it is displaying my 10cm cylinder as 0.100, so that's promising.
Thanks for coming back. Great points and I don't know enough about rendering to have commented so thanks so much for the insight. Cool to hear about your scale experiments and thanks for coming back with the results 😁👌
@@ArtisansofVaul Thanks! After some testing, the Blender unit scale feature just divides the units it shows you internally, so while you create a cube and it comes out by default as 2mm, and shows as 2mm, it's exported and treated with all the camera clipping issues just like if you set units to meters and typed in 0.002. Importing into Lychee still makes it 1000 times too small. I found you could export by a factor of 1000 in the STL export option to fix the import issues in slicers, but that doesn't solve the other issues with blender operating at such small units.
thanks for the video. I have some issues. When I import stl file into slicer software is seems like it is lowpoly object it doesnt matter how much subdivison I apply. I check wit 3d print addon seems everythin is ok. I dont know why
When 90% of users need to go change the default unit settings, maybe they need to change the default settings? I'm very often when they update blender I have to go in and make sure these units are still set correctly. I have always felt that there should be no "blender units" at all it's just confusing and unnecessary. It should just be millimeters and the scale of that mm unit should be one. And that exporting at that setting should result in all slicers and 3D printing services reading the scale correctly. (Whereas currently with mm the scale must be 0.001) And of course you can change it to anything you want. IMHO.
@EPeltzer I think the issue is that while 90% change the units they are not changing them to the same thing 😅 So it makes changing the default a change that maybe helps 10% of people only to annoy the 10% of people that weren't changing it 😆 Also as shown here the Blender units are very adaptable so I'd be very disappointed if they went away
Great video! How could I take a 3D model and print it on papel so that the scale on paper matches those on blender? I mean, I want to creat an object and then creat a blueprint of it.
Hmm.... That's tough, I'm not sure if there might be a way of doing that in the render settings to control the size of the image created. Personally I'd bodge it and bring the image into a program where I can draw something that's exactly (for example) 10mm and then match the image to that. You can do that even in Microsoft Word. But it isn't exactly perfectly precise.
Very good video ! i have one question ! if i set it up to metric or none ..when i add a cube ..it still show 0.002 m in the item dimension ! how do i fix that ? Thanks you !!
@@ArtisansofVaul woow that a quick reply ! awesome ..! thank you sir ! well at least i can always do like you show at the end of the video ..exporting stl file and transforme scale , it work very well to. haha !
@LUMINAK No problem at all. I'm just frustrated I can't offer more help. Maybe save the file and then come back into it to see if that works (though you shouldn't have to do that). Hopefully you find a way to sort it.
@@ArtisansofVaul I understand , no worries mate ! :) very appreciated ,keep up the good work ! subscribed ! you got a lot of very useful tutorial for blender ! mostly for hard surface modeling . I am very good at organic sculpting ! also new to sculpting but, i got lot of potential . hmm i would like to share a picture ...you wont be disappointed . haha !
when i was working in mm scale to design something I was getting this issue where blender would merge vertices, especially in circles and when scaling and beveling.
Is that because you have changed an existing file instead of starting from scratch? If it is, you could try making a new file set to no scale, then copy and past the object you want into this new file. I cant say I have ever had this issue but I did make my change over at the start of the file/design.
1:07 😂 I'm a "savage" (American) and even I don't use Imperial when it comes to 3D printing. Just like "English is the language of aviation" so too is metric the standard measure of 3D printing.
🤣 I think you might have missed the point of the video. You're completely right in that you can think of them however you want. But as a focus on 3D printing there is very specifically a way other computer software interprets the information Blender puts out in say an exported STL file. And that does give Blender units a real world unit. And if you're 3D printing that's very important as it saves you work/time/annoyance. Have you 3D printed from Blender created files?
@@ArtisansofVaul ok so... whatwas the point you were getting at? because that's honestly all I'm getting here. "what blender sees as a meter all other programs see as a milimeter, and a blender unit equals a meter according to blender" by that logic a blender unit is actually a milimeter... right?
I totally disagree, I have been designing and modeling in Blender for 3D printing for a few years and I have always setup my interface to work in millimeters. I have yet to have any of the issues you are claiming! I think your problem is NOT Blender it is the total shit slicer software you want to use! Try using a REAL slicer instead of this crap and NO it has very little in common with Chitubox, although I have absolutely no love for that slicer either but have and can use it and still do not experience the problems you are having with Anycubics hacked up crap slicer!
You can disagree all you want but did you even watch the video? I use the free versions of both lychee and chitubox interchangeably and in terms of import scale, they are both perfectly fine taking my items that are designed in blender (in "meters" that I think of as millimeters) and they import them, again as as shown in the video, at 100% scale and they measure correctly in mm and print correctly in mm when checked with my digital calipers. Sorry you think the most widely used and easily accessible slicer programs are bad? Which one do you use, you failed to mention. It is also worth noting that if you really are hung up on what the made up unit number says in blender, a third way to make it work in most other normal slicers that everyone uses that take a "1 unit" and consider it a mm is by going into the Scene Properties tab, going into Unit System settings and then under where it shows Metric selected, you can also change the unit scale there as well to show 0.001 and then set that as your default start up as you would with any other preferred settings. But quite frankly as most slicer softwares I am aware of are seeing STL file numerical units and reading them as mm, there is going to be an issue if you do not use the same default numerical value Blender has called "meters" if you're not adjusting your Blender unit scale.
I'm glad you haven't had any of these issues but I (and others is seems from the comments and various forums) do. Do you also find your physics simulations working well as that's another issue I forgot to mention? I'm curious what slicer you use? As shown in the video I use Lychee but I'm always happy to hear about different programs to try. And yeah, the Anycubic slicer is horrible (though I haven't used it in years at this point to know if it's changed).
