3D Printing with SketchUp: Real-world case studies to help you design models in SketchUp for 3D printing on anything ranging from the smallest desktop machines to the largest industrial 3D printers with this book and ebook

SketchUp works on both Windows and Mac, and comes in a free version called SketchUp Make, or a commercial-use version called SketchUp Pro. To download, go to www.sketchup.com. You'll be asked how you plan to use the program, either for personal, commercial, or educational use, and then will be directed to a page to download SketchUp. Make, which is excellent for designing 3D-printable models for non-commercial use, comes with an 8-hour trial version of Pro.

This book uses commands and screenshots from SketchUp 2014 for Windows. Commands in earlier or later versions of SketchUp and SketchUp for Mac may vary slightly from those shown in the screenshots and written commands. All of the exercises in this book can be completed with either SketchUp Make or SketchUp Pro.

Once you've installed the program and opened it, you'll see a splash screen where you'll need to choose a default template as shown in the following screenshot. Scroll to the bottom of the list...

Templates allow you to save settings in your model and quickly access them later. Styles in SketchUp affect how your model looks on the screen, and are included in templates. With styles, you can add shadows, different color backgrounds, and line weights. While the settings are useful for presenting architectural models, they don't really help while modeling for 3D printing. Even worse, they make SketchUp run slower because the computer has to work harder displaying those extra visuals.

Style settings can be found by navigating to Window | Styles. Play around with different styles to see how they change the look of the model. The 3D Printing template that we chose when starting SketchUp has good settings such as a plain background and shadows turned off, but let's tweak it to help with troubleshooting. In the Styles dialog box, choose Default Styles, then 3D Printing Style.

Click on the Edit tab in the Styles dialog box, then click...

Toolbars allow you to access commands faster than using the drop-down menus in the menu bar. There are many pre-made toolbars, and you can create your own custom toolbars as well.

For starting out, I recommend you turn off the default Getting Started toolbar and place the Standard, Styles, and Views toolbars at the top of your screen, and the Large Tool Set along the left of your screen. The Large Tool Set has many of the tools you'll use while modeling. The Styles toolbar is useful for toggling X-ray mode, and turning colors on and off while modeling. The View toolbar is used for aligning the model to camera views such as Front, Top, or Iso views.

While toolbars are nice for beginners, I recommend you also learn the keyboard shortcuts to speed up your modeling. You can find a one page cheat sheet of keyboard shortcuts at http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/116693.

Extensions, also commonly called plugins or ruby scripts, transform SketchUp from a cool program for architects into a super versatile modeling tool that nearly anyone can customize to their needs. Extensions in SketchUp 2013 can be installed in a few different ways. The easiest way is via the Extensions Warehouse dialog box inside SketchUp. The first extension we install will allow importing and exporting of files for 3D printing.

Stereolithography [.STL] is the most common file format used as input for 3D printers. SketchUp doesn't natively have the option to export to [.STL], but a couple of generous programmers have written an extension that does just that. They released it for free, as the vast majority of extensions for SketchUp are, and now anybody can generate [.STL] files from their SketchUp models.

To install the extension, navigate to Window | Extensions Warehouse and sign in with your Google account. Search for "STL" in the upper-right corner of...

Let's make our first 3D-printable model, a simple box with a hole through it. We'll export it as an [.STL], and then import it back to SketchUp to see how the process works by performing the following steps:

You should have something like the following diagram with X-ray on, so you can see the hole goes all the way through:

Select the group, and then select Export STL... under...

In this chapter, you installed SketchUp and customized a template that will allow you to model for 3D printing quickly. You learned what extensions are, how to install them, and where to find many more that are not available in the official Extensions Warehouse.

You made your first 3D-printable STL file, and imported the file back into SketchUp. Finally, you also learned why it's important to merge coplanar faces on imported STL files. In the next chapter, we'll learn how to design a 3D-printable model starting from a 2D sketch.