Modeling for 3D printing

I’m eagerly awaiting the amazon fairy to deliver my Ender 3 any day now but I’ve already started modeling my project.

I have an object that contain multiple meshes. will it print or do i have to re-mesh into a “manifold” mesh (which i don’t really understand).

i found this on line https://cgcookie.com/articles/how-to-prepare-objects-for-3d-printing-in-blender. it seems to say I need to combine all the meshing into a single “watertight” mesh. is this correct?

i should add that all the meshes in the object overlap. there is nothing floating free.

thanks

My brother uses an Ender 3, he loves it. It will most likely be my next purchase. Two things he said to make sure I got, a leveler (sold by same company), and a direct drive extruder upgrade kit for it (I’ll check which one he got).

It only makes sense you will have to combine all parts by selecting all parts then hit CTL J.

Voxel remesh is exactly what iam using. It solidify the model very well. Sometimes with high detailed model I set the resolution to be too dense and then there is a lot of geometry which makes the file too big, so decimate modifier is also helpful, it cat reduce the geometry by 80-90% without affecting the final result when printing. My normal workflow before printing is:

-Select the object and ctrl+J to make it as one object
-voxel remesh ( you can find it as a modifier or in the object data properties) type there a resolution, it starts with 0.1 but it is a try and error depending on what you are modeling.
-Smooth corrective modifier. Its not necessary, it just smooth the model a bit. Iam using 0.5 scale value.
-Decimate modifer - that helps me make the final model light without necessary geometry. Iam using that much as 0.2 value, but it depends on the model.
-Export as STL and it is ready to print

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thanks for the detailed explanation. my printer arrives today, i will check it out for sure, i expect i’ll have a few questions.

No need to remesh anything. Just avoid making it manifold, parts can intersect each other. I use ender3pro too with prusa slicer.

@edit, fixed

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what do you mean by “Just make it manifold”? how to do that?

also i was planning to use a free slicer, cura

A STL with multiple intersecting parts is fine. Cura and PrusaSlicer treat it as if you did a boolean union. Simplify3D might not work the same.

Get yourself a digital caliper.

Welcome to the club.

so i’ve successfully printed many complex objects with no problem. some of my more complex parts use several objects, so i select all the object parts, then export selection only to stl. i have to scale by 10 for some reason but no biggee

i open the stl in cura and its ready to print, could not be easier, no joining objects, making manifolds or any of that BS. i guess the export to stl collapse everything down to a simple object