“SketchUp and 3-D Warehouse are whatʼs great
about design collaboration today. People
Disney Concert Hall - Los Angeles, CA
Scale 1:1200
A Download You Can Touch
3-D Printing and SketchUp
By Sweet Onion Creations
An idea is sketched out on a napkin over lunch. The
designer fires up her laptop and breathes digital life into it in
SketchUp. The concept is tweaked, rendered, and uploaded to
3-D Warehouse. Now anybody can mash the design up even
further, pushing and nudging a concept.
Now you can download that .skp file, scale it to whatever
size you like, and build it out on a 3-D printer. Yep, it’s now
possible to literally watch an idea go from napkin to digital to a
physical object in a matter of a few hours.
There is something inherently powerful about holding a
scale model in your hands. The design just seems a bit more
concrete. Issues and space relationships make more sense. A
physical model almost always guarantees a spark of innovation
from the experience of touching and seeing.
In the good old days a physical model from a CAD
application meant looking at 2-D views and busting out the
1
downloading, designing, uploading, and sharing
ideas with powerful, user-friendly tools. Our
goal is to take these ideas and turn them into
something that can be touched.”
Jake Cook, Co-Founder
Sweet Onion Creations
Exact-O knife and Band-Aids. It usually ended with cutting
foam board until the wee hours of the day fueled by adrenalin
and espresso. Balsa wood forests were decimated all in the
name of architectural and structural models. Emergency rooms
made fat profits on stitches. All this was before 3-D printing.
History of 3-D Printing
3-D printing originally came about during the 1980’s
pushed by the design needs of product engineers. Driven by
the need to prototype ideas quickly and yet achieve tight
tolerances for manufacturing, the technology was fairly rough
at first. The biggest challenge was how to take what existed on
the screen and translate this into a set of instructions a machine
could read to assemble models. (Click here to watch a video of
how 3-D printing works)
SWEET ONION CREATIONS, BOZEMAN, MT The .stl File
File formats can be a confusing
aspect of 3-D printing. Like all
computers, 3-D printers are big dumb
machines that need specific instructions
to take bytes and translate that into
coordinates and then build a physical
object. The convention for doing this
has been the STL file format which
stretches back to the early 80’s. In the
Wild West days of 3-D printing, there
was no sheriff in town and unfortunately
cross-platform standards and protocols
were not developed. (By the way, STL
stands for Stereolithography or Standard
Triangulation Language. Our favorite
STL Definition: Stupid Triangles and
Lot’s of them.)
Yes, the shape to describe all that
information comes back to a good old
fashioned triangle and its normal vector.
Think of it this way: Normal vectors are
basically a big fictitious arrow that
sticks straight out from the middle of a
triangle. This arrow tells the 3-D printer
all about how to read the information as
it relates to the surface of the object.
Mesh Surfaces of Triangles
When you line up all these little
funky shaped triangles, you literally
make a “mesh” over the top of an object.
The more irregularly shaped the object is, of triangles
the more the number of triangles is
needed and the denser the mesh. It
actually looks a lot like the bags of
onions or oranges you find at the grocery
store.
Now, all these triangles have to line up
and share a common edge. If they don’t, SketchUp has come up with a few tricks
our big dumb 3-D printer gets confused
as to how the surface is laid out and
decides to not put any material down, in
Google Earth
This topography model went from
digital to physical in 55 minutes.
effect leaving a hole. The usually
happens when the normal vector (the big
pretend arrow sticking out from the
triangle) is facing the wrong way.
Here lies the challenge of 3-D
printing: You can have tens of thousands
and they all have to line up
next to each other, share common edges,
AND have their arrows sticking out in
the right direction.
Working With .skp Files
As always, the community of
for .stl files. You can read more on this
thread regarding exporting .stl files
Whatʼs Ahead
As SketchUp continues to be
adopted at an accelerated rate and
making the cross-over to a 3-D printer
gets easier, look for a new design
conversation to take place.
Being able to quickly to jot down an
idea and render it out with ease does
wonders for online communication and
remote collaboration.
However, there is something
weirdly satisfying with holding your
idea in your hands.
File issues will continue to be the
biggest hang-up in making the cross
over. With .stl files being the preferred
format for 3-D printers for over 20 years
it looks like we’re stuck working in that
Scale City Model of
Jacksonville, FL
The entire city was downloaded off
3-D Warehouse and built to a scale
of 1:1800. This included the
interstate and bridge system. The
regions cruise ships and sailboats
were also built and assembled in
the harbor. The final model
measured 7 x 4 feet.
Click here to see more examples.
straight out of SketchUp using a Ruby
script.
The other option is to export the .skp
file into your favorite third party CAD
package and from here export it again as
an .stl file.
The majority of the clients Sweet
Onion Creations works with prefer to
focus on design and not mesh triangles.
Using a few special software tools built
just for repairing corrupt .stl files, we’re
able to fix these designs for the machine
and also bring out unique features such
as topography, building materials, or
even custom logos.
box. As the demand grows to take an
idea offline and into a physical format,
the electronic tools will catch up.
Tips
The idea of designing with 3-D
printing as an eventual goal can make the
file conversion go much easier. For
example, many buildings are designed
without a bottom and plunked down on a
surface. Making sure that a design is as
“watertight” as possible drastically cuts
down on clean up.
If you’re interested to learn more,
click here to learn more about 3-D
printing and see case studies for
architecture.