Tips for FDM-process animation ??

[Ecki]

Hey dear benderartists community,

my Name is Roland, I am new to blender. I have to/want to create an animation of an FDM 3D printing process. I have created my first attempt of an animation, but now it’s not really what I was looking for.
At the moment I have created a text then added a “solidify”, “remesh” and “array” modifier.
I then used dynamic paint and set the initial text to transparent.
After the brush has painted the first layer it looks something like this:

And as you can see it doesn’t really look like an extrusion process of thermoplastic material. When the animation is finished it looks like a uniform Text with a simple rough hard plastic texture.

I would want the process to look more like something I found on youtube…

My only idea would be manually laying a path in the shape of my text and somehow making it appear during the animation…
How would you guys create such an layered effect? (Please try and keep it relatively simple as I am no pro like most of you here)

Would really appreciate it if you could give me some advice =)

Cheers Roland

[clockmender]

First thing to say is “Welcome to BA!”

Now to your issue, there is a mesh type known as a Curve, it can be Bezier or Nurb. Once created it can have a bevel object, this gives it solidity. The bevel object can have a start and end value, normally 0 for the start - it starts at the beginning of the curve and 1 for end, it ends at the end of the curve. These values can be key-framed over time, or you can use Drivers, etc. So that is how you “grow” the shape of the curve, the curve in itself will not render as it has no substance or solidity. It can also taper, in that it can have a taper object.

The bevel and taper objects must also be curves, in its simplest form a Bezier Circle for example. You can also make you own shape from vertices, then convert this to a curve object (ALT+C => Curve from Mesh). This is how I would do it, can I suggest you do some reading of the manual pages, then create a simple blend file and upload it here for us to look at.

Cheers, Clock.

[Ecki]

Awesome thanks Clock Had the curve and used a bezier circle, but I wasn’t sure how to key frame the “growing process”.
Man you made my day thanks