Great! I imagined it would be helpful because of the added control with vr. I’m just worried about the learning curve, but again, it still wouldn’t be as hard as fully learning blender. My guess is that this would be more helpful for more rounded and smooth prints, while other tools like blender and fusion 360 would be better for precise parts and rigid models, but I do already know a bit of both.
Correct.
GS is good for hand drawing stuff, and while you can do precision work with it, you have to wrestle it to get it to do it.
There's ways, they're just difficult.
Like the name suggests, it's great for free hand sketches and the ideation process. If you want to make art or sculptures, gravity sketch is great. But I would rather spend some time learning fusion first. It's way more capable and lets you do more stuff suitable for 3d printing.
But since gravity sketch is fun, just learn and use both. But I never printed anything from GS in the last years since having it.
An engineering CAD package like SolidWorks, Creo, Fusion, etc. is a much better option for prints for functional purposes that need to be dimensionally accurate. Those models are parametric so you can step back through the model tree to adjust stuff after the fact / make sure things fit together by building relations into assemblies.
I found gravity sketch was an awesome tool for more organic shapes for 3D printing. In my opinion the learning curve is easier than blender and the physicality of VR interaction is really nice. That being said, unless you follow best practice meshing in gravity sketch (a bit of a timely chore imo - more puzzle solving than part of the creative process), your model won’t be a closed manifold. It will likely contain bodies that a 3D print slicer won’t identify as solid, or some areas will be ambiguous (like intersections of manifold bodies).
Most of my gs models produced decent (not totally perfect, but maybe not noticeable to the untrained eye) prints anyway when I just yolo and export .obj to Cura (check it looks ok in the slicer before going ahead). Cura has a plug-in to automatically fix non-manifold surfaces I’ve tried with variable results (doesn’t know which polygons you care and don’t care about, so can mess up some geometry).
It would be awesome if the gravity sketch dev team could build in an export/preview geometry for 3D print feature that could fix/highlight non manifold issues before sending to the slicer.
GS has proven really great for organic shapes to me. I'd lose my mind trying to model what I'm modeling in rhino. But in GS it's a piece of cake.
I model in subd so it's less likely to have non manifold surfaces. But I did notice some weird stuff during exporting - some shapes, while looking ideally smooth in GS, in rhino have dents or lumps. It's like some surfaces are wavy, if you know what I mean. It gets lost during 3d print, but I can see it during product renders. Other people don't, so that's fine. :D
I also wish fbx export didn't create like 8million triangles and kept same control points but oh well, can't have everything. (also rhino 7/8 can do subd but still control points are way different than in GS)
What I do is:
First model the important features that have to me mechanically fit.
Export and load into GS online.
In VR add the organic features I want to add
Export from online environment of GS
Slice and 3d print
You can model in GS for 3D printing! Check out the tutorials on our YouTube, like this one: https://youtu.be/ddl9wAG21bc?si=DQnGrKEK7baFvPqz
Great! I imagined it would be helpful because of the added control with vr. I’m just worried about the learning curve, but again, it still wouldn’t be as hard as fully learning blender. My guess is that this would be more helpful for more rounded and smooth prints, while other tools like blender and fusion 360 would be better for precise parts and rigid models, but I do already know a bit of both.
Correct. GS is good for hand drawing stuff, and while you can do precision work with it, you have to wrestle it to get it to do it. There's ways, they're just difficult.
Like the name suggests, it's great for free hand sketches and the ideation process. If you want to make art or sculptures, gravity sketch is great. But I would rather spend some time learning fusion first. It's way more capable and lets you do more stuff suitable for 3d printing. But since gravity sketch is fun, just learn and use both. But I never printed anything from GS in the last years since having it.
An engineering CAD package like SolidWorks, Creo, Fusion, etc. is a much better option for prints for functional purposes that need to be dimensionally accurate. Those models are parametric so you can step back through the model tree to adjust stuff after the fact / make sure things fit together by building relations into assemblies. I found gravity sketch was an awesome tool for more organic shapes for 3D printing. In my opinion the learning curve is easier than blender and the physicality of VR interaction is really nice. That being said, unless you follow best practice meshing in gravity sketch (a bit of a timely chore imo - more puzzle solving than part of the creative process), your model won’t be a closed manifold. It will likely contain bodies that a 3D print slicer won’t identify as solid, or some areas will be ambiguous (like intersections of manifold bodies). Most of my gs models produced decent (not totally perfect, but maybe not noticeable to the untrained eye) prints anyway when I just yolo and export .obj to Cura (check it looks ok in the slicer before going ahead). Cura has a plug-in to automatically fix non-manifold surfaces I’ve tried with variable results (doesn’t know which polygons you care and don’t care about, so can mess up some geometry). It would be awesome if the gravity sketch dev team could build in an export/preview geometry for 3D print feature that could fix/highlight non manifold issues before sending to the slicer.
GS has proven really great for organic shapes to me. I'd lose my mind trying to model what I'm modeling in rhino. But in GS it's a piece of cake. I model in subd so it's less likely to have non manifold surfaces. But I did notice some weird stuff during exporting - some shapes, while looking ideally smooth in GS, in rhino have dents or lumps. It's like some surfaces are wavy, if you know what I mean. It gets lost during 3d print, but I can see it during product renders. Other people don't, so that's fine. :D I also wish fbx export didn't create like 8million triangles and kept same control points but oh well, can't have everything. (also rhino 7/8 can do subd but still control points are way different than in GS)
What I do is: First model the important features that have to me mechanically fit. Export and load into GS online. In VR add the organic features I want to add Export from online environment of GS Slice and 3d print