And voila: you can find the trouble-making mistake. Select a surface (face) you want to hide and select ‘Edit’ > ‘Hide’. Since it looks solid from the outside, it makes sense to take a look at what’s going on inside. In the example below, the ‘Entity Info’ window indicates that the object is not solid. However, even the inside of your model could feature many modeling mistakes that would make your object unprintable. Looking at your model from the outside means that the inside is a ‘black box’ for you.
If you designed a watertight model in one shell, the Entity Info window will say ‘Solid Group’ and then you know that your model is ready to be 3D printed (in the next steps we’ll tell you how to fix this).ħ: Look inside Your Model with the ‘Hide Tool’ and ‘X-Ray-Mode’ Right-click on it and select ‘Explode’ to re-edit the components. This means that your model is not printable and you’ll have to check it again. If you designed an object with holes (not watertight) and internal intersection (not in one shell) the Entity Info window will say ‘Group’.
The STL file format is the most commonly used in the 3D printing community and will make it easier to share, print, and edit your design in other software.
Even though our online 3D printing service accepts these files, you might want to get SketchUp’s free STL Extension. Typically you can save your 3D model as a SketchUp file (SKP). You can change the template by clicking on Window > Preferences > Template and selecting ‘3D Printing – Millimeters’ or ‘3D Printing – Inches’. This way, you won’t need to re-scale the printing size of your model later. Some simple clicks before getting started will make your life easier: you may want to set your SketchUp template to metric or imperial units. That’s why we put together a list of 10 simple yet effective tips and tricks to make your SketchUp design 3D printable.ġ: Set your Template to Millimeters or Inches
However, preparing a SketchUp model for 3D printing can be a little tricky. SketchUp is one of the most popular 3D modeling & design programs for 3D printing, as we found out from our analysis.