Any way to 3D print a craft these days?

[nestor_d]

So I used the Eucl3D 3D printing service twice. I loved it, it was truly great. Unfortunately the company went broke and they no longer offer the service. One of my two models got stolen (long story), and I'd love to replace it. My intention is to use a service like shapeways or similar, but I can't figure out how to create a 3D file from a craft, I can't get blender plugins to work. Anyone know anything I could do, or better yet, help if you can get the plugins working?

Thanks! any help much appreciated

[usfreitas]

I am also looking at printing some of my ships. So far I've been able to install the blender add-on from @taniwha and import a ship. I think I can generate a printable .stl file but I want the textures as well, and I'm still working on the later.  Did you try this blender add-on? I could help you with the installation, if you get stuck.

[taniwha]

Textures get loaded too, and most KSP shaders are supported. There's a bit of a "bug" in blender where vertex color inputs to shaders default to black when the mesh has no vertex colors, but that can be fixed by going through the materials disconnecting the vertex colors input from the main color node.

[usfreitas]

That was a fast reply @taniwha

I was about to write on the other topic asking about textures. Yes, they are loaded. I even went and manually changed the shaders so they look right in blender.

What I need is to export the model with the textures to an .obj file or something equivalent, but the textures didn't make it when I tried.

I am fairly new to blender. Maybe is something simple that I am missing...

 

Great work on the add-on, BTW.

[taniwha]

@usfreitas While it's intended for exporting to .mu, take a look at the mass-export.py script in the addon package directory: it writes out the textures as well as the models. It should be easy to modify it to export to obj.

[usfreitas]

Thanks! I'll have a look. Yesterday I even baked a texture from a part, copied the part and created a simple material for it with the new texture. It worked for the export to .obj, but the texture quality wasn't good and baking took a considerable time. A direct export will be much better.

[steuben]

I've been staring at a similar question for a while, but from a slightly different angle.

While I know the technical answer to the question is, yes... the practical answer might be "I need a frickin' drink", or specialized tools will be needed.

My reflex thought is that the craft would be printed as a monolithic block, at least as near as printer volume will allow. And as hollow as can be structurally allowed, cause hey printer feed is expensive.

My question is on the difficulty of breaking a model down into something closer to the classic plastic model kits. Then taking the parts and gluing them together. Though the tech has come a fairways since I've started looking at it. I think that it would reduce the amount of printer feed needed and the cost of misprints.

 

 

[usfreitas]

I want the textures because I want to have a ship printed with a material jetting 3d printer. See here for a sample of what such a printer can do. Can't wait to get it working...

[Corona688]

A ship in Kerbal Space Program is not one mesh, but quite a few pasted together.  This works fine on a graphics card.  This does not work well  when the object has to be computationally cut into slices and printed.