MakerGear Forum

I am new to 3d printing but have been researching it for a year. I have a drafting business and want to be able to show a 3d representation of interior and exterior architectural layouts. Can this printer do that well? How do you estimate your cost in a print? What additional software will I need other than AutoCAD? Anything else I need to consider before purchase? Thanks in advance!

Autocad will output STL files, which you can then import into a slicer program.

The open source toolchain uses slic3r and pronterface. They're good tools, but will requires a lot of tweaking on your part to make them work.

Makergear pushes the Simplify3d product (S3d). It costs 140 for an individual user license, and is a lot easier to use than slic3r with much clearer results. I bought my printer in February and stuck to the open source tool chain until about a week ago. I broke down because I was fed up with the quality of the supports generated by slic3r. I can't really complain, it's a free tool. Very impressive for what started as one man's pet project. But after a few days of tinkering with S3d, I'm hooked. This tool slices very quickly, provides a 3d graphic interface to the plater, and allows custom support placement. Once you've sliced your design with it and generated gcode (what the machine reads), S3d will provide you with an estimated print time and print cost based on a $/kg value that you enter in the options box. Most small trinkets use a trivial amount of plastic, less than $1 worth. The biggest print I've considered printing yet was estimated at 36 hours of print time and around $10 worth of plastic. ... I haven't brought myself to try printing it yet, though.

So yes, plan on buying a copy of S3d for $140, because you'll need the support generation and will appreciate the visual interface.
Beyond that, you should just need to buy raw materials and consumables. Rolls of filament, maybe kapton tape, hairspray or elmer's glue, compressed air cans...

Good luck.

abovetheline wrote:3d representation of interior and exterior architectural layouts. Can this printer do that well?

At least as well as any other DIY 3D printer and far better than most, I'd say.

All DIY 3D printers have a rather coarse resolution that affects the results: in round numbers, the smallest feature will be 1 mm square and 0.2 mm high. That's no fault of the M2 and much better than traditional architectural layouts made from sliced foam-core boards, although it tends to surprise people who expect an injection-molded surface finish.

In particular, gently domed horizontal surfaces (like, say, a grassy hillside) will show obvious terracing and vertical surfaces (a wall) will show layering. You can "fix" that by the manual processes and materials that jimc mastered long ago in his custom automotive shop, as long as you're willing to regard the 3D printed model as an unfinished product that requires extensive manual finishing.

How do you estimate your cost in a print?

In round numbers, the cost of the plastic will be negligable in comparison with your cost of design. You get a lot of stuff from a $50 kilogram spool of plastic filament! [grin]

The real issues for you will be:

• print time, which is proportional to the model's volume (and material cost)
• system glitch rate, which isn't under your direct control

The slicing program provides an estimate of volume (or weight) and print time, although the time estimates generally seem low. For large models, the print time can be tens of hours, which approaches the overall system's mean-time-to-failure due to various mechanical / electrical / programming / operational glitches.

Rather than printing a single, monolithic object that takes 40 hours to finish, you will get better results by chopping the model into smaller parts that can then be glued together.You can orient separate parts for best surface finish and minimum support material, then join them with nearly invisible joints.

Bottom line: if you don't expect more than the process can deliver, it can't be beat!