3D Printing

Last week I provided some Revit Architecture Training for Z-Corp.  Z-Corp is a company that makes 3D Printers and does 3D printing.  Most of the training involved how to get your Revit model to print out thick enough so that it could be printed.  I am actually working on a sample project (not finished yet) I build in Revit and trying to see how difficult it is to thicken. 

A major part of the process is using the STL Exporter for the Revit 2009 platform (any Revit 2009 product) that is available from Autodesk labs to try out.  STL is a file format that most 3D printing software can use to print models. 

STL Exporter for Revit Platform 2009

As I suspected, the hardest part in thickening your model is getting component families thick enough to print.  This involves having to edit the family and stretch extrusions and geometry so that it would print out correctly or this is a good place for different family types.  If you’re doing a lot of 3D printing, you could create types for every size of window and door in your model for your 3D Print.  This would make the swapping out process easier, could be time consuming to create all the types, but if you use the same families a lot, maybe you would only have to create them once. 

The next hardest part has been around thickening curtain walls.  It’s pretty easy to thicken the curtain wall panels, but difficult to thicken the mullions because changing their type requires unpinning all of them.  This is a little time consuming.  Instead, I just decided to create a new curtain wall type that had the thickness I needed and then replace the entire wall instead of a piece at a time.  

As part of my research I looked into a website called CADspan.  CADspan has a free tool called the 3D Print Thickness Calculator.  This helps you to understand how thick things need to be in your model for you to print correctly at the scale of the print.  It has helped me out in getting my model in good shape for printing. 

The last thing I wanted to mention about 3D Printing is controlling the visibility of what prints.  Revit is very nice for this because of Visibility and Graphics.  You can use visibility and graphics to easily turn off any geometry that you do not want to see print.  To further limit geometry you can use a Section Box.  This limits what is exported via the STL Exporter (and a good way to create interior prints).

I’d be interested to hear about any experiences you have had with 3D printing and the challenges you have had with getting Revit models to print.