Selecting Document Setup options

Make sure to select the same unit type that you chose in your template millimeters or inches when exporting, and choose the binary file format to reduce the size of your file. In order to make your SketchUp model printable, you need to ensure that each and every surface has a wall thickness.

How to Print to Scale from Google SketchUp 8 - dummies

Without setting a wall thickness, a 3D printer has no information about how thick or how thin it is supposed to print your part. The picture below shows a model with paper-thin surfaces not printable, left and a solid object with thick walls printable, right. If you want to learn more about how thick your walls need to be exactly, make sure to read this blog post. A printable model must not feature any holes in its surface.

Ask yourself the question: if I were to put water inside my model, would it flow out? This is one of the trickiest parts of creating 3D printable models in SketchUp.


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The design below is an example of a model that is not watertight. You can clearly see that there is one big hole on its surface. Once this hole is closed for example by drawing new lines , SketchUp recognizes that the object is solid on the inside and ready for the printer! You can see such a watertight also referred to as manifold object below. In the case below, the left shape will not be printable once it is pulled into a 3-dimensional object since it will feature paper-thin walls within the object.

Creating watertight models with one continuous outside can be tough sometimes. Luckily SketchUp lets you check if you made any mistakes.

Best Free 3D Printing Software for Slicing and 3D Printer Control

However, even the inside of your model could feature many modeling mistakes that would make your object unprintable. And voila: you can find the trouble-making mistake. We already pointed out that designs with overlapping objects create problems for 3D printers. To start with, we have these two solid blocks. We also selected the x-ray view to make things easier.

SketchUp setup and print from a Mac

We then move one block into the other. We now have overlapping areas in the interior of this object.

How to Print to Scale from Google SketchUp 8

The last thing to do is to click on the second block. SketchUp automatically created one solid group out of these blocks.

As you can see, the internal overlapping parts are gone. Jack where did you get info the cited scale is perfect.? I assume you trying to print the model on A3 mm x m.

3D Printing with SketchUp: 10 Tips and Tricks

IE landscape vs portrait. When you print the program makes some allocations for margins, tool bars etc. You need to set the desired drawing to match the aspect ratio as close as possible to you screen and of course the printer sheet size to A3 unless you are trying to print on Landscape as noted above. If you go then to the print preview screen and select fit to page Su will show the page size it calculates it will print and will also give scale info on what the scale is to print to that one A4 A3 page. Su then uses the pixel extents of your model to calculate the screen size and using that and the margin allocations above to print to the page.

There are some plugins that resize the view port that my help but have not used so hesitate to suggest…. JackSnowdon February 1, , pm 1. DanRathbun February 2, , am 2.