How to Use Afanche3D to Prepare Model for 3D Printing

Afanche3D provides many useful features for 3D printing model preparation. With help of Afanche3D, your 3D printing job can be much easier than what you thought.

Define 3D printer build volume

In order to take advantage of some features of Afanche3D for 3D printing, you need to set up your 3D printer system first. Go to "Tools" menu, click "Options", in "3D Printing" tab of the popped up dialog, type in the length, width and height of the build volume of your 3D printer. It looks like the following screenshot:

Show printer build volume in 3D graphics window

Afanche3D can visualize printer build volume in 3D graphics window. Just go to "Utilities" menu, click "3D Printing", click "Show Printer Platform". This feature can be very helpful for 3D printing verification purpose. You can easily find out if a 3D model is too big or too small for your 3D printer. The following pictures shows 3D printer build volume together with a 3D model:

Slice 3D model in order to fix a bad model

Sometimes, your 3D model can't be printed successfully because it has some problems. Very often, you can cut off the bad part of the 3D model and just print the good part. Afanche3D provides 3D model slicing feature which can be used for printing model fixing purpose. The following picture shows a 3D scanned model. Please note the bottom part of the model. It has gaps and uneven bottom boundary. If you send the model to 3D printer directly, very likely the 3D printer would fail.

In order to fix the problem, we can cut the bottom part off. Select the 3D part first by clicking the 3D part, then go to "Model" menu, click "Clipping", click "Coordinate Plane", you will see the following popup dialog:

Afanche3D allows you to slice along different direction at different position. For this example, the default inputs are good enough. Let's just click "Apply" button and the original 3D part is sliced into two parts:

We can just delete the bottom part and save the top part in STL format and send it to 3D printer.

Check 3D model with printer build volume to see if it fits

Select a 3D part first, then go to "Utilities" menu, click "3D Printing", Click "Check with build volume", Afanche3D will tell you if the selected part fits the build volume of your 3D printer.

Automatically fit 3D model with printer build volume

Select a 3D part first, then go to "Utilities" menu, click "3D Printing", Click "Fit build volume", Afanche3D will automatically scale and relocate the selected 3D part and make it fit the build volume of your 3D printer. The following picture shows a model which is too big for the 3D printer:

After the auto fitting operation, the following picture shows the result of the operation. You can see the model is inside 3D printer build volume perfectly.