I’m new to this. I want to start making my own 3D printing models to use for cosplay. Just a hobbiest. I have a 3D printer which I’m still learning but I need to get a laptop that I can use to run Blender for making these models. What are my best options without breaking the bank? I don’t plan on making animations or anything like that, just straight forward models to be 3D printed. I know you can’t recomend any particular laptop, but in looking at you Minimum and recomended requirements, I’m not sure I need all that power for the simple purposes.
And please keep in mind that although I’m pretty good with software , hardware (the laptop) is my weakness.
Minimum requirements and hardware supporting them are mentioned, here.
If you can not afford an hardware supporting a recent release of blender, it is possible to download and use an older release.
For 3D Printing, you will have interest to get hardware able to handle a maximum of polygons, for sculpting. What means that everything VRAM, RAM and CPU have to be decent.
Anyways, even if your hardware have difficulties to handle high poly meshes.
Low Poly modeling will always be possible.
That’s Helpful Thank you. If I’m just making armor and weapon , models that don’t need a lot of detail and rendering, do you think I’d be ok on the low end of the requirements?
For your case, you need as much RAM as possible. I’d say at least 32 GB, but laptops with that kind of RAM are rare and expensive. Any reason you can’t get a desktop instead?
I wanted something I could work on on the move. But I can look into it. The thing I can’t seem to get my head around is, why do I need that much RAM if I’m not doing animation or even skins and textures?
If you don’t do sculpting at all, you will not need dense meshes.
For the slicer, the lower the polycount is ; the faster the slicing will be.
So, you could be fine doing models with a reasonable polycount.
Polys will be necessary for round parts of model, to add details like texts, many screws or patterns creating ridges and valleys, texturing a surface.
Subdivision of geometry is an easy and common way to obtain that. But that is not mandatory. Round parts can be created, using curves or bevel tools for a lesser polycount.
And you can avoid to texture surface.
It is just that the lower the performance of computer will be, the more the amount of options to model something will be limited. The more strict will be the way to model, the slower you will be in your achievement.
For example, one quick way to glue multiple objects is to remesh, them by generating a dense mesh made of a lot of quad faces of same size. But to preserve some angles of global shape, mesh density may require to be high.
32 GB is recommended to create a scene made of a lot of objects, to handle things like fluid simulation.
So, less than 32 G is workable, too. If your interest is just to create an accessory per file.
If you want to see and create a complete character with a lot of details, that could be problematic to try to have all its accessories in one file.
8 G could be sufficient, too. That only depends on how detailed, your model will be.
Thank you that is very helpful. I won’t be doing multiple or complete characters. Just individuals knives swords armor pieces ect…
This is really begining to help me alot.