A beginner starting in 3D printing with Blender - update May 18th - layers

[JCL]

Hi Andy,

 

Sooo, had a look at that bogie, and, except for the wheels being too small, the bogie too long, and it being too far forward, it's spot on! It's probably the right colour. Here's an image that I've put together from the measurements I've made. I'll look in my boxes for some more wheels. I'm not too hopeful, but you never know. If not, then I'm looking for 14.6mm 10 spoke wheels if possible.

 

 

So as you suggested, and seeing as I'm using WSF for the prototype, I'm going to model a new bogie and see how it goes. I wonder how much it'd be in steel...

Edited December 19, 2014 by JCL

[alanbuttler]

You legend JCL this thread continues to wow me :-) I must print it all out and get started with a project my self over Christmas. I've just got my 3d printer operational after some schenanigins, it would be good to see how a chimney comes out.

[JCL]

Hi Alan, thanks very much, it's really appreciated!

 

I've been burning the midnight oil - I should have thought more about the coupling rod as it goes slightly too high, and there's a crank pin that comes a long way out for the connecting rod. Well, I've done what I can on that. I've also caught some mistakes and such. The main ones are:

• Not enough space for the wheels inside the cab (between the wheel and the cab wall)
• Making the splashers longer, but not making the higher part of the footplate over the rods correspondingly longer.
• Moving the splasher walls out from the centre of the loco to accommodate the connecting rod (just in case) - this might be a temporary measure as I may end up swapping out the wheels.

Anyway, apart from the safety valve I'm going to soon call it done. I want to get a couple of chimneys, domes and safety valves "knocked out" for an E1, a Stirling/Sturrock 2-2-2, and hopefully a pair of 7mm GNR railing posts (maybe) if I get time, and then I'll make an order. This will be tomorrow while the sale's on.

 

Here's where I am at the moment. The big cylinders on the drivers shows the outer limits of the rod as it travels around the wheels. (I hope).

 

 

https://www.shapeways.com/model/2957249/lner-d3-loco-test.html?li=aeTabsif you want to give it a spin..

 

cheers

 

Jason

Edited December 19, 2014 by JCL

[JCL]

Safety Valves

 

I almost forgot my safety valve! Essentially this is a cylinder stretched along the boiler. That is, the ends have a completely round profile but there is a flat centre section. I've decided that for the prototype I'll not include the lever as this could be too fragile.

 

 

With that in mind, I created a thin cylinder with 60 segments at one end of the fitting. Then, in Edit mode, I selected the half of the cylinder I was going to stretch (this could be fiddly, so zoom in and make sure you get the right parts of the cylinder) and dragged that along the Y axis using G and Y. I then selected the top face of the cylinder using the loop select that I showed you when making the chimney (Alt+rightclick) and using E, Z, dragged a new loop vertically. Only a fraction of a millimetre though as I'm making a flare. Then I used G and S to scale that loop. That is, the top loop was made smaller and started to follow the decreasing diameter of the loop on the plan. If you aren't sure, head back to the beginning of this thread and have a look at the video of the modeller making a wine glass.

 

 

In the image below, each of the orange lines represents an  E Z extrude upwards combination When I got to the line with the white section, I needed to make a step, I did this by pressing E and S just to extrude another section without moving it along the Z axis, but instead, just scaling it inwards.

 

 

Next, I extruded once more to pull a loop of vertices up to the top of the valve. Finally, I needed to press F to add a top face, and then select the bottom loop in wireframe mode and do the same. Two cylinders on the top and I was done. If I knew it'd print, I'd add the lever, but as I say, I'm going to leave it out on this prototype. I will add the rivet/bolt on each end though, and some more on the cab front.

 

[JCL]

Although it's subjective, I've decided I've gone from duffer to beginner now that I've got my first loco to a point where it's ready for a test print. Below is a composite photo of the loco in Blender's Render mode. I used the Cycles render engine by choosing Cycles at the top of the screen. You can see in the images below that there is a lot of stuff where the bogie should be. I've done this to store the extra bits needed such as the bogie itself, the buffers and the prototype's bogie mount (or whatever it's called). The sides of the mount protect the buffers. The idea is to get the model through the checking process, the the safer the parts are, the better.

 

 

Then I started thinking about the other projects I mentioned below. With practice I've got to the point where it takes me about 15 minutes to produce a chimney and a little more to do a dome. The most important thing is to get the the profile right. After that it's almost an automated process - well, at least it is to get something that looks good to me, other opinions are available! So, I scanned a photo of a general arrangement for a Stirling Single 2-2-2 loco (not the famous 4-2-2), resized it, and then drew up a chimney, safety valve cover and smokebox door. One of my biggest Shapeways costs is postage, so I'll get as much done as possible and make one order.

 

 

I also had a quick look at the GNER E1, which is a 2-4-0. It has a 4'5" boiler, but more importantly, it has the same wheelbase and driver wheel size as the GNER D3. This means that there is another potential use for the Hornby 4-4-0 chassis. The boiler is narrower than the D3, so I wanted to make sure the chassis would fit inside it. To do this, I copied the chassis and wheels from the D3 file and pasted them into the E1 file that I started. As you can see below, it *just* fits! It'll be a helluva tights squeeze though, I'll have to make sure that the chimney, dome, etc don't enter the inside of the boiler, and of couse, there'd be no peg there. It'd be an interesting job to get lead installed!

 

It could also share the tender with the D3. So this could mean that I could get a small fleet of GNR locos heading through Havenhouse Station. Obviously this would have to be at night because I've never lined anything in my life...

 

 

Here's a rough idea of what some of the bits look like on the loco. I'm using a side on photo of the loco and some measurements from the RCTS book that covers the E1. There are quite a few useful measurements included such as the height, width and depth of the cab, the wheels I know, and if I had the tender in the photo, the length over the buffers would be really useful (assuming the tender in the measurements is the tender in the photo).

 

[JCL]

Oops, I think I broke Shapeways

 

[Jaz]

It was great to meet you this year, love your thread, the only thing is i will have to make time to read it slowly enough to understand it LOL.

meantime

MERRY CHRISTMAS

[backofanenvelope]

Yes I am going to be doing the same and as I have been going through all my old Railway Modellers I have some drawings to be going on with. Best wishes for the festive season Jason and hopefully see more of your workings in 2015

 

Regards

Tom

[JCL]

Thankyou Jaz, I hope you have a great Christmas as well. I really enjoyed meeting up albeit briefly. Next time I promise to make sure I'm in the country for a couple of days before I attempt conversation!

 

Hi Tom. It's funny, when you start doing this you suddenly realise that there are so many plans out there that you want to have a go at. I'm really pleased I started down this path as I've been putting it off for such a long time. I'm going to do one more post before Christmas (maybe later this evening) and then I think that'll be it until some sort of model arrives. It appears to have crossed the border into Canada, so my fingers are crossed.

[JCL]

So, here's one more. I'm going to give you an exploded ducket to start off with (now that's not a sentence I ever saw coming), and then I'll show you the order I'll be putting in during the sale. It was mentioned in another thread on this site it's a shame they don't have a no postal charges sale. That would make life a lot easier. Anyway, first up, the ducket. A ducket from a 6 wheel coach, I took this from Nick Camping's brilliant book of LNER and constituent coach plans.

 

I'm going to do this a bit differently to normal because there were a lot of dead ends on the way so I ended up scrapping the step by step. I'll show you the finished thing, and the parts exploded that have gone into making it. Hopefully that'll work for you. Duckets are interesting. A fairly basic shape, but I found them a pain to put together in styrene sheet, and to be honest, the result wasn't that robust. So here's a virtual (at the moment) model of one.

 

The first thing I did was convert a plane into a curved line that follows the profile of the ducket. Nothing new here, it's just a plane that is convert to a vertex with Alt+M, then use E for extrude multiple times to click around the edge of the ducket on the underlying plan that you have set up and sized correctly.

 

 

I then based the ducket on this single line as I want all of my shapes to have this edge on the outside; or an edge that extends out from this profile.

 

1. The profile line again
2. Side beading. I needed to think about this. The edge of this needed to line up with the outside of the side. The profile lined up with the inside of the side, so I couldn't do that. In the end I copied the side (4) and, in Edit mode, I deleted one side of it, so creating just a plane. This I joined together like I did with the main side (4). After this, I subidived to create a couple more vertices which I dragged into place to create a cutout at the top. The side beading lines up with the leading edge of the upper beading. Remember, the main side is slightly narrower. The side profile (5) lines up with the main side () This gives me room for the beading thickness.
3. This is the main part of the side. I used the profile (1) again, but this time I joined the two ends into a shape that looks like half a bottle. I then used  F to create a face from this loop of vertices. Next, I used the subdivide tool to create two new vertices and a horizontal edge that I moved to the same height as the bottom of the window. One more horizontal at the top of the window, and I was able to then use the knife to create the verticals before using Face select in Edit mode to delete the rectangle I'd just made.
4. The main part of the ducket. The outer edge of this is the red line. I used extrude to stretch this line across the front of the ducket, and then the solidify command with a thickness of -0.8 to turn the edge into a solid object. Later, I reduced the extruded width of this part by .5 to take into account that each side of the ducket has beading that is .25 thick.
5. The upper beading. This is a copy of the profile (1) that has a solidify modifier that is 0.25 thick. I then cut edges into it using the K knife command (I think I linked to a video of this a couple of posts ago) to make the inset panels. Not pressing the Apply button on the Solidify modifier meant that each time I cut into this part it self healed and added new faces for the sides of the beading. This is such a cool property.
6. The lower beading is again taken from the profile and has a Solidify modifier with a thickness of 0.5. This gives it an actual thickness of .25 as the upper beading is .25mm thick. I then used Loop, Cut and Slide in the side view to create two verticals on the inside of the beading before selecting the faces that needed to be deleted and doing just that. A couple of the horizontal edges weren't in the right place so I selected them and used  G G to slide those edges up and down. G G is fantastic as it slides vertices up and down along an edge. This means that you aren't using X, Y and Z to try to keep everything smooth.
7. A cube. I deleted the front and back faces and used Solidify set to -0.3 to create a window frame. It's proud of the side by .2
8. Finally, the easiest bit, a cube stretched into a thin box.

I'm not sure that made sense. I might have another go at it after Christmas.

 

All of the parts have exactly the same origin. To do this, I set the origin for the main side (2) to geometry. I then copied the location values from that object to the 3D cursor before setting the origins of all of the other parts to the 3D cursor. Finally, I used the Mirror modifier on the Y axis to create the other side of the ducket.

 

Anyway, you end up with this.

 

 

As you can see, I enjoy getting the crayons out, colouring these things in and rendering them. Maybe I liked Toy Story or something. I used something called the Cycles render, which I mentioned a while ago. If you're interested, here's a video about it. Obviously it has nothing to do with 3D printing, but looks interesting if you're that way inclined.

 

 

Taking some of the tips from that video I had a go at adding some sheen to some of the bits I've been making. In the image below, you can see that the dome is completely matt, whereas the chimney looks like it's had a bit of a polish. The difference is in the materials, and as mentioned in the above video, it was a case of changing the Surface value from Diffuse BSDF to Glossy BSDF. The smaller value in the roughness box, the glossier the part. The chimney has a roughness of .412.

 

The bench is a GNR bench that I'm going to test. It's one that's found in Wainfleet, Lincs, but it's about 1/2 the length of that one. To make it, I found a plan and just traced around it before using solidify. The planks are stretched cubes

 

 

And, finally...

 

Edited December 22, 2014 by JCL

[JCL]

Last one. I thought that was it, buy the prints arrived this afternoon, so I thought I'd share two photos with you.

GNR style tender. I seems to have printed vertically and has an incredibly slight inward bow along the bottom length, and the sprue holding the extra parts inside the tender body bows out slightly. But I'm pleased with it - it even appears to be the right size!

 

 

GNR railing posts and a test D3 dome

 

[MikeOxon]

I've just been browsing this thread.  As you know, I followed up your earlier Silhouette thread and built several models of my own, but this thread literally opens up a whole new dimension

 

It's a pity that the third dimension makes the drawing task so much more complex,  but your thread makes it look 'do-able'. Perhaps, I shall take the plunge one day.

 

In the meantime, you've earned a break and I wish you a very enjoyable Christmas.

 

Mike

[uax6]

Those parts do look very good. Any chance of a quick blow over with some celly so that we can really see the detail?

 

Nice little chrissy present to yourself!

 

Andy g

[Flying Fox 34F]

Jason,

Just read through the entire thread and I'm impressed.

Also now feeling inspired to have ago myself!

I have an old version of Turbo CAD with 3D, which I never fully managed to crack,

but I think I might just download Blender and see how it goes

 

Paul 4475

[JCL]

Cheers Paul, it's always good to get some feedback. I know there are some dead ends in there, but hopefully it isn't too difficult to follow. The difficult thing was pulling together the information. I won't say I'm anywhere near an expert, but if you give it a go and have questions I'll be happy to work through possible solutions with you.

 

At the moment I'm doing a couple of things on MikeTrice's Emily -> Stirling Single thread and my own Wainfleet thread. Once they are done I'll be able to put in an order. I've been thinking about the cleaning up of the parts, and unless you want to use acetate and potentially have problems, ordinary washing up liquid seems the best thing. One person says to dunk the part in neat liquid to clean the parts, others say use a sonic bath. I don't have one of those, but I do have a sonic toothbrush (with a spare head), so I'll give that a go before undercoating. Unfortunately I dropped the tender (like an idiot), and broke off the corner, so I'm going to reprint the corner and see if I can splice it in.

 

Cheers

 

Jason

Edited January 4, 2015 by JCL

[MikeTrice]

One person says to dunk the part in neat liquid to clean the parts, others say use a sonic bath.

Perhaps we need a sonic screwdriver. Seems to do everything ;-)

[JCL]

You say that, I had to concentrate to put the word toothbrush in instead of screwdriver. I must get out more.

[rue_d_etropal]

Always good to see more 3D printed models, especiall when people are using low cost CAD software. I personally still prefer to use Alibra, as it allows me to specify to very fine decimal places, and debugging is very easy, like coding. It also has ability to rescale easily, and a good drawing feature, which makes it easier to print off and match against other drawings and loco chassis , in various scales so can try before spending money or more time. Some designs have been halted when I realsed something would not fit, a mistake I made on occasions when I started.

Do Blender and other packages have facility to produce good quality drawings?

[JCL]

Hi Simon

 

Thanks very much for your thoughts.

 

I would say that Blender is a 3D modelling application aimed at the film industry so that designers can create animated objects in either realistic or stylized scenes.The animation studio Pixar take on new employees with Blender experience, and has added to Blender's functionality for example. It isn't a traditional CAD program that would be aimed at engineers.

 

Blender doesn't appear to have a print button, you would do that by rendering an object and then saving it as an image to then print. There does seem to be a free Add-on called Freestyle that can render plans that can be printed out elsewhere, but I haven't looked at that, and I don't know if it would allow a print to a certain scale. I got around this by modelling the chassis within Blender that I was going to use for the LNER D3 and then checked it on the screen by changing the material to transparent as opposed to printing it out - I then reused the chassis model later while looking into the LNER E1. This worked out better for me personally, but I can certainly understand going down the printing route as well. Who knows? If it was available there's every chance I would do it as well. 

 

While Blender can rescale, my assumption is that it wouldn't rescale with a minimum wall width constraint. It can get down to six significant figures when moving and resizing objects, faces, lines and vertices.Blender works with "Blender units" rather than a particular measurement unit, but I now go with the suggestion that 1 Blender unit is 1mm.

 

I would say that, if you're after engineering software, or used to using engineering CAD software, then Blender is probably going to be very frustrating. If you work in a similar way to me, and you have the time, then it's worth a try.

 

cheers

 

Jason

[rue_d_etropal]

Jason,

that is what I thought. it wasn't something I even considered when I started, but it is very useful to print out a design before spending any money on a print that does not work.

I did have a look at Blender and it was pretty obvious hat it was originally designed for, similarly for Sketchup. I think this is only really a problem for people like us in a hobby that requires a pretty high level of accuracy, but as more people try out 3D printing, it will become easier to turn those designs into real objects.

Although my main interest is railways, I want to show others that 3D printing might be a good idea for a startup business, without having to spend a fortune first. I just wish I had started 10 years ago, although it is only now that the costs and technology are right.

 

I do have to the time to play with software, but engineering CAD software is a lot easier for me to use, adapt and debug. There was(probably still is) a month's free trial with no obligation, and a pretty good tutorial suite to play with. Much of the more advanced stuff went over my head, but I leant enough to know it would work for me. I have started to use some more advanced features, but it is then that you realise you need to invest in a more powerful computer, and there is a maximum level of complexity that is practical.You also start to think more like an engineer, rather than as a mathematician doing drawings. Think how a machine(lathe?) would actually produce something and it suddenly becomes obvious. Also a bit like an artist/sculture adding stuff, then cutting away. I did not realise this at first, but in our models there are a lot of curves with bits hanging off them, and mathematically that is complex so you have to work out other ways. Putting rivet type shapes  on a curved surface is a good example.

Edited January 6, 2015 by rue_d_etropal

[JCL]

I now have the models that I created a while ago. The two images below are the ones I created on this page, and the rest, which include another GNR logo and some miscellaneous items, are on my Wainfleet thread if you're interested.

 

This is the D3

 

 

And these are the duckets

 

 

They are both straight out of the packet and will require sanding and priming etc.

 

Although it's been a while since my last post, I think that's it's a good way to end this diary. Thanks for following my trials and tribulations.

 

Jason

[backofanenvelope]

Jason, the topic has been in my view a really informative and enjoyable read and has got me back to playing around with blender again and just wanted to say thanks for the effort. You must be happy with the end products and having that skill has opened up and whole new world. I am sure there are many who may not post in this forum that will have benefited from your progress and I hope you will post any other 3D projects you start in the future.

 

Once again many thanks.

 

Tom

[Corbs]

Top banana! What a veritable goldmine of a thread, well done!

[JCL]

It's been a while! I certainly think that I did the right thing learning Blender as it's proved to be extremely versatile. until recently I was having trouble selecting groups objects that were very close to, or inside other objects. This led me to layers.

 

Layers

The last model that I created had four main parts, and a sundries.

• locomotive body
• cab interior
• sprue containing parts such as chimney, pipes, etc
• chassis
• Other stuff

 

I needed the parts to be fairly close together so that they wouldn't cost too much when printing, but I needed to be able to easily select items that might be very close to each other. I'd also like to be able to select groups of objects (sub-assemblies) and look for a way to be able to turn them on and off at will.

The best way I've found to do this is to make use of layers.

 

In the toolbar at the bottom of the screen are twenty squares in two groups. Each of these squares represents a layer, so there are twenty layers available. There is a dot in each of the layers that contain objects as you can see in the image above.

All objects are created by default on layer one, and you will see that the first box is slightly darker as it is selected.

Move Objects between Layers

 

To move an object to a different layer, select it and press the M key. As oyu can see in the image above, this will show a little display that repeats the layer boxes on the bottom toolbar. Now click on the next square to the right (layer 2), and your object will disappear as it's now on layer 2. You can see this because there is a tiny dot in the layer 2 square. You can select multiple objects and move them all in one go.

Viewing Layers
To be able to view more than one layer at a time, press the shift key at the same time as you click on each square. To hide a layer, select a layer that isn't currently visible.

If you start using layers, remember at all times which layer you are currently on when creating your objects. I've found layers work best with sub-assemblies, and things get confusing quickly if there are random objects across different layers.

 

Better Layer Management

If you want to be able to name layers, and to be honest have an easier time of it, you will need to turn on layer management. This isn't available by default. To do this, see the images below.

 

 

Clicking on the layer tab (arrowed below) you will see the layer panel. You can add layer names here, hide or display them, and lock and unlock them. Locking a layer will prohibit you from selecting the objects on that layer. A green tick will tell you which is the active layer.

 

Edited May 18, 2016 by JCL

[Revolution Mike]

Hi JCL
 

The easiest way to turn things on/off is the list of items in the top RH box - if you toggle the eye symbol it switches items on or off.

 

In terms of selecting things close or inside each other you could use the lasso select?

 

Cheers, Mike