3D printing sizes from Blender files

Not the most showy topic/video but one that is really important to understand if you want to 3D print from Blender without getting annoyed.

Hope you find it helpful!

[sathivv]

I couldn't figure out why the top layer of my models in the slicer would have weird artifacts. I then noticed they went away if I scaled my blender model up by 1000. Now I know why that worked. If only I had seen this video a week ago. Thank you very much for covering this at least after all that pain I have a rational explanation now.

[SkonkBot]

One of the first things I changed in my defaults was units to mm, scale to 0.001 and grid to 0.001 - had no issues with blender, various slicers and other design software.

[jeffellis]

*Converted to Blender units!* Thankyou so much! I only work in mm and it's now perfect. I'd messed around with changing scale and units to 0.001 etc. but some addons only work in meters when set to mm. Even bolt factory and punchit works properly now! Brilliant!
Orca slicer gave a slightly annoying "do you want to convert to mm on every import" and even that's gone.
Love the "I'm not a savage" comment! I worked for two American companies before I retired - the last one made things in the US and bought components in causing me to I travel Europe with two lots of tools and some were tiny allen keys I had use fully suited, masked and gloved... grrr...
Bloody excellent. Cheers!

[RobertTolone]

Very helpful video. I’ve been puzzling over this units issue for a while now. This explained it neat and sweet. Thanks!

[HaniTiby]

Blender units was a mystery to me, now everything is clear thanks to you

[LondonTessaAngelit]

This is very helpful to know. I have worked in Blender for years and never knew why this happened. Thanks to this video I can understand how to not have the itty bitty problem when importing to slicers. Awesome and thanks :)

[Enfillyon]

I was trying to figure out scale relative to units in blender and this is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

[hashkeeper]

saving this and will use as a teaching tool. perfectly explains everything

[Thiccron]

Don’t know how it took me so long to get to this video. Thanks vaul this is incredibly helpful

[StormyHotwolf]

OH god, I'm so glad I asked the question. Your video is a life saver.

[AL-gomv]

You fixed several of my problems in one video. Thank you!

[patwood]

I wish I had discovered this video two years ago! Better late than never. I work in mm and use the Boolean tool a lot, cutting out tiny little things. I tried the technique of choosing mm and changing the scale. My booleans are not happy campers with that approach.

This video is the best I have come across in explaining how Blender dimensions work. Thanks for making it easy to understand and for making me laugh. 

My country is still working in Imperial Measurements, and it drive me crazy, so like a lot of folks here, I have just started working with metric. For goodness sake try adding 1/16 + 3/64+ 5/8 or even worse having to convert to the decimal versions and adding 0.0625 It is nuts

[creativohugo]

this worked like a charm, thank you so much! I made the mistake of turning the original file I was workin on into mm and was very puzzled when it looked microscopic in size on lychee

[darrennew]

I've never had any problem working in mm. It's floating point numbers, so scaling by 1000 doesn't affect the precision even though blender tends to truncate the lower digits on display. I've also not had to worry about the scale, because STL files don't have units anyway, so every program I use assumes they're mm. Maybe your one slicer is confused and you think that's why importing things is a problem. And of course if you're doing something like a cloth simulation to create a minifig's clothing, you need it in the right scale for the simulation too (where "right scale" would be making the minifig several meters tall). I probably haven't done as much as you, but I never noticed blender crashing or anything like that, and I just set my far clip-plane to maybe 100 meters instead of many kilometers away when I'm working in millimeters.

I'm loving binging this channel. So much good info here.

[chuckmower]

Thank you so much. This was something I have been trying to get answers to and you gave the best answer.

[Blefuscu]

Thanks for this... everything was fine in my little 0.001 world until I needed Bolt Factory! Just a note on the stl export window, that might be helpful to some people but wasn't mentioned in the video, (and wasn't obvious to me) if you want to set up default parameter on export such as 'selection only' or 'scale by 1000' you can do this by setting up a key-binding for Export STL, and editing the parameters of the key binding. I use f5 for this... it was the only way I could get 'selection only' to stick.

[DerekGoveDesign]

Really interesting video, thanks for making it. Most of my work is exported as an stl for a CNC machine, which—like 3D printers—deals with mm as the base unit. I've never had a problem with working in mm in Blender, but have had to remember to scale models up and down as appropriate when switching to and from 3DCoat or for final export. Setting Blender's units to 'none' might be a nice simple way to simplify that part of my workflow. 👍👍

[DaveTimperley]

Brilliant! Thanks for this vid. I'm just starting out with Blender and 3d printing and the whole 'blender scale' thang was pissing me off. Especially when I add a new object to scene or fiddle around with grids.

[Foxomatic]

This video explains why I'm experiencing a number of strange issues. Especially when it comes to the 3d Printing tool and errors. If I make anything very small, the tool spits out Zero Faces ans Non Manifold. But, the moment the object is scaled up, the errors evaporate. May test later to see if switching scale helps with this issue.

[mattpollock]

Haha loved the disclaimer at the start. 👍