heres my first attempt at sketchup and my new simple metal

[spider2k]

totally justified a $700 printer to the wife.

[Mooselake]

Nice! Happy wives make it easier to get those printer mods. I'd guess you made the stand, and not the figurine, for your first project.

Now you should take a look at openSCAD...

Kirk

[spider2k]

is it easier to learn than sketchup is why? i'm just now dipping my toes into 3d printing and design.

[orangefurball]

Your design looks good!

By the way, to make the circles higher quality, when you place down the ring you can highlight the circle itself (it will turn blue), then right click and select "entity info" then change the number if segments to 100 from 24. After that you can push/pull to the desired length and have higher quality circles!

Every 3D design suite has it's own pros and cons. I use Sketch up and love it!

[Mooselake]

OpenSCAD's probably more difficult than Sketchup for most people (it's really a simple programming language), but in exchange it's more flexible, and it'll let you put customizable objects on Thingiverse (insert takerbot warning here...). It's nice to have several tools in your toolbox.

I've used Sketchup for other things, but not for 3D printing. I just tried a simple test to make a cylinder with more segments, to make it look more like a circle than a collection of flat pieces; the directions said to select the circle, and change the number of segments in it's entity info. It wouldn't work after the circle'd been extruded (latest sketchup 2015 makers ed), but will if you do it before extruding, so if you don't like the look you need to delete it and start over. Maybe it's just me; sketchup just seems to have a lot of little glitches that are livable for drawing outbuildings, but would make 3D objects difficult. I'm just not as good with it as the furball. None of this is to take away from your project, and it's just my opinion, of course, and I'm still a bit stuck in the drafting table and t-square days.

Check out Tinkercad,too. I think they'll give out free accounts again now that Autodesk's taken them over. It's how I did my first few 3D printer objects.

Kirk

[armandd]

Hi,
I see from the image that you used the default number of segments when defining a circle (24). When you start the circle, the number of segments (polygons) is shown in the unit box at the right bottom corner of the window. Enter a larger number (say 100) to generate a really clean circle.

Alan