The sculpting was done in the previous chapter; it's now time to cut the model into pieces suitable for 3D printing. This is accomplished with Blender's traditional object-editing tools, as opposed to the sculpting tools used in the last chapter. Blender's combination of organic and more rigid object modeling is one of the things that makes it so powerful and versatile. In this chapter, we'll prepare the model, create the puzzle space, and apply that to the model to create the individual pieces:
While sculpting the sun face, there was very little effort made to make the model conform to a particular size. However, this is an important consideration when building the model for 3D printing because of tolerance considerations, which will be covered in more detail later.
Every 3D printer has a range of print areas that it can handle. Naturally, if designing for a particular 3D printer, this should be taken into account.
For this project, the model is going to be sized so that it will be too big for any printer to print. The smallest popular 3D printer on the market has a print bed of 120 mm squared, or about 4" on each side, so that one will be what this model will be resized for.
At the end of the previous chapter, the sculpted face was left in Object Mode. Before continuing, make sure that the project is still in Object Mode, or some later steps may get confusing.
Follow these steps to scale the model:
- In the Properties panel (N), to the right of the default view, locate the Dimensions pane:
- Change the X dimension to
100. - Now, locate the Scale setting, just above Dimensions, and make note of the X scale necessary to make this model
100mm wide:
- Round the scale value off to something easy to type (such as
6.5in this example) and type this value in for the scale for X, Y, and Z: