Reply To: Supports needed in Slicer or not?

Sorry for the long response time. I didn’t get a notification that you responded. 

Anyways, looking awesome!!!

Regarding 1:  “I couldn’t use the dowels, they weren’t fitting. Probably my fault or the parts I printed were too small, and my printer is not enough accurate? I therefore glued everything.”

This is not your fault at all. Every printer has its unique margin of error. As I was learning about my printer, I had to model a few different holes and different-sized pegs. It took about 30 minutes of printing but in the end, I found the size that worked for my specific printer. With that being said, some printers do struggle with smaller resolutions and therefore might have some hard limits on what they can and can’t do. If you don’t mind gluing your pieces, there is nothing wrong with skipping the dowels and just making everything flat so that you can glue them together. 

Regarding 2: “For the canons, although the beginning of the print was going well, at some point the printer was like lost. It printed what I would call a ‘small bags of knots’. The canons have a diameter of 3.7 mm, It’s once again maybe too small for my printer…”

My guess is the size did contribute to the knotting of the printer. Did the knotting start to occur when the cannons became hollow? My guess would be with such a small size, the hollow portion may have been particularly difficult.

Regarding: “Some thoughts and questions about this experience with Blender: I feel like modeling hard surfaces as we do in the tutorial, so with Blender is ok if you don’t want accurate models, but not really suitable if you need a lot of accuracy. For sure, Booleans don’t help, as using the non-manifold feature can lead to unexpected results (like some parts being destroyed or slightly different). “

I definitely have some strange things happen with booleans within Blender but I am finding strategies that help alleviate these issues. Do you have any screenshots of the unexpected results or destroyed geometry when trying to make it manifold? I would love to try and troubleshoot some of these for you.

Regarding precision, I don’t think Blender is going to replace engineering software like SolidWorks anytime soon, but honestly, I have been able to design and print models that were within a fraction of a mm precision and work as intended all within Blender.  I think the biggest issue (for me at least) is knowing the limitations of my 3D printer and then modeling within Blender with these constraints in mind. For example, I needed to model a rectangular prism that slotted into a square hole and I found even the orientation I printed the peg changed the margin of error I could print within. 

Also, please ask as many questions as you want, I love helping.