Subtitles of the Movie

We're now going to look at sending our 3D Model to become a 3D Print. Now when I say a 3D Print I don't mean a paper plot or an electronic plot. What I mean is a stereo lithography file, an stl file. There are companies out there now that create prototype models using stereo lithography. What it means is they literally put this model into a machine that creates a plastic or resin prototype of your 3D drawing here, and it will actually create it by squirting resin into a machine, and it forms it using heat, resin, and plastics to make a prototype. So, let's have a look at that now and how that works. There's our 3D Model. We've got two parts to it, a lid, and obviously and outer casing there. So I'm going to go to the Output Tab here. Now make sure, when you're working with 3D models, and more importantly sending them to a 3D Print Service you must be in the 3D Modeling Workspace, that is very important. You need that so that you can get to the Send to 3D Print Service here on the Output Tab. So I'm going to click on Send to 3D Print Service here, and you get a dialog box. Now if you click on Learn about preparing a 3D model for printing, that will allow you to read the documentation. So if I click on that, that will actually go to a browser and there we are. You've got the Manual there: Preparing your model for 3D printing. Now that is part of your AutoCAD installation, it's one of your Help screens. I'm actually going to close that there. I don't need it, and it'll take me back to AutoCAD. So, what I'm going to do there is click again on the Send to 3D Print Service and just click on Continue this time, and I have to Select the solids or watertight meshes. You can do this with either a 3D solid or a mesh, it doesn't matter which. So, I select my lid, and my casing, like so. I then right-click to confirm. That then brings me up my Send to 3D Print Service dialog. Check the Scale, the Length, the Width, and the Height. I'm not going to worry about changing any of those, but what I really like here is this little Preview screen. I can Zoom Extents like so, I can Pan in the little Preview screen like so, but more importantly, if I right-click now I can zoom and I can zoom in by holding the mouse down and going up and down, as you can see. So as I click and hold and bring the mouse down I can zoom, but if I right-click again I can also orbit and check out my 3D Model in the Preview screen. Now that is very cool. I can check it all out before it goes and make sure it's OK. I'll go back to Zoom Extents there now, like that. When I hit OK now what happens is it takes me to a folder that I've preset. As you can see there's an stl, a Stereo Lithography file there already, and as you can see the File of Type is Lithography. Now I'm just going to overwrite that one that's already there, so if I click on Save it'll say do I want to replace it? Yes it will. So, that's now been overwritten, and what it does now is it takes me to the Autodesk web site, but it takes me to a part of the Autodesk web site where I can select a Service Provider to print my AutoCAD 3D Model. Now here are some examples, look: there's the National Stadium at Beijing for the last Olympics, or a Powder Valve Assembly. You can see they're in that sort of cream, resiny color Ð a non-colored resin, a non-colored plastic. So you can see there that they've actually added parts to that resin prototype. That is a stereo lithography file; that little resin prototype there is what's made from that stl file. So if I scroll down now there are some manufacturing 3D Printing Service providers. There's Redeye, there's the Zed Corporation, and as you can see they give you costs per cubic inch of material. Now you can see it's reasonably expensive. It's 25 pounds per cubic inch, I should say dollars there, actually. I'm from the UK. Obviously I misread that there. I apologize to any Americans out there; but it's dollars rather than pounds. But you can see that for a cubic inch of material it's costing 25 dollars, 15 dollars, but think about it. If you look at the National Stadium of Beijing in China, if you built a prototype out of steel, think how much that would cost against a plastic or resin prototype like that to see whether it all works, whether it all fits together. It's an obvious solution, isn't it, for a prototype? It's a low-cost prototype, and you can actually see something real, something 3D, something solid in front of you. So as you can see there, you've also got Architectural Printing Service Providers, and they're the ones that did, obviously, the Beijing Stadium. I'm going to close that now and go back to AutoCAD. So, there you go. That's how you send to a 3D Print Service to create a 3D Stereo Lithography Model of your 3D drawing on the screen.