I’ve never used a 3d printer before but want to get one. I have a bit experience in blender but not too much. My question is: How do you model for a 3d print? For example, if I want to print a hollow cylinder, I go into blender, create cylinder and delete the side faces. If I print this, the walls will be pretty thin. Do I have to make them bigger manually? and if I do so (extrude and scale) does my slicer (cura) automatically fill in the solid part?
If you’re new to 3d printing, I would avoid Blender. It’s too easy to create non-manifold and non-watertight objects with it.
In your example, the walls aren’t just thin, they have no thickness whatsoever and would not even appear in your slicer.
I would recommend trying Fusion 360 if you’re not on Linux, openSCAD if you have a basic understanding of coding, or even TinkerCAD (web based) if you’re not making anything too complex. Those are made to create physical objects.
Onshape is also good, the free version has all the functionality you could want unless having private models is important to you
Fusion360 can run on linux using WINE, HERE is a GitHub repo showing how to set it up.
Or the web version works on linux too ofc
That being said I use and recommend onshape if you aren’t planning on doing this for a company professionally that already uses F360
I mostly use solid basic shapes (like e.g. a cylinder) which I modify using extrude or moving edges/vertices and then combine using the boolean modifier, which can do union, difference and intersection.
Sometimes you have to switch to carve in the modifier to get it to work correctly.
The important thing is to only work with watertight objects. So for your hollow cylinder example I’d do the following:
- Create a cylinder with the desired outer radius and height.
- Create a taller cylinder with the radius of hole.
- Move both onto the same location. The taller cylinder should stick out on bottom and top
- Select the outer cylinder -> modifiers -> add modifier boolean -> difference to inner cylinder
- Select the outer cylinder and export it with the option “Export only selection”