I just got a 3D printer but I'm a total noob.
How many more steps have to occur between these models and me printing them?
How many more steps have to occur between these models and me printing them?
Shouldn't be too hard. Based on the code of the examples it seems it can output polygonal meshes in ply format. Either your slicer natively supports that, or you can use something (for example blender) to convert the ply to a format your slicer supports.
What can go wrong if the model "looks okay" but have some subtle geometric issue (like if it has a missing face, which makes it non-manifold or non-watertight) Nowadays many slicers have tools to heal such problems, but there can be dragons that way.
I looked for an example object in their repo and found this one: https://github.com/openai/shap-e/blob/main/shap_e/examples/e...
If that is representative it is a very nice clean geometry. I have sliced it with prusa slicer no problem and I could be printing it within a minute of downloading it if I would need a 3d printed cactus in my life.
> I just got a 3D printer but I'm a total noob.
How noob you mean? If this would be literally your first print I would recommend printing first a sample file which came with your printer. (just to make sure everything is okay with the printer itself) But as a second print you can totally try to print one of these of course. Just don't give up the hobby if something goes wrong :) Something always goes wrong.
I successfully printed a hollow cube yesterday, my first ever print, and failed on about 6 attempts at a "mario ring" file. It's PETG and I'm just fiddling with settings, getting a lot of stringing etc.
Anyway, very new, but I'm prepared for the learning curve. I'm a good debugger, and I don't give up easily, so hopefully that'll carry through to the printing.
Mind you, i only bought filament from Prusa and AtomicFilament, two very respectable manufacturers. Had zero issues with their PLA, and it looked beautiful. With PETG, no matter how much i tried adjusting live-z levels or playing in PrusaSlicer with print speed levels, temperature, layer height, etc., it all would mess up at some point. Out of 5 prints of the same object, I finally managed to get one great print out of PETG. But when I tried printing another one, I would start having various issues again and would have to adjust things again in hopes of eventually getting it right. I just went back to PLA and had zero issues at all since then.
Even though I am aware of PLA disadvantages compared to PETG, I simply realized that for my purposes, they didn't matter nearly as much as consistency and ease of good prints.
Thanks!
I'm also going to re-run the cube to see if the same settings work a second time, prompted by your comment. I've really only had failures with the one model.
After many years of falling out of love with 3D printing, PETG helped me fall back in love with it.
I heard that PETG is more sensitive to humidity from the air than PLA. So maybe that is the difference? Maybe you live in a dryer climate and the person you are responding to has more moisture in the air?
For additional context, my main issues with PETG were prints detaching from the printing bed midway through (but i fixed that one by adding brims to my prints + using printing glue on the bed, and a textured sheet would help with that even more), and a more major one was the nozzle getting strings and eventually the material sticking to it and accummulating to the point of the nozzle getting clogged on the outside/unusuable (recovering from which would require aborting the print and doing the 10-min long cleaning ritual with heating up, rubbing alcohol, brushes, etc).
PETG does tend to curl and stick to the nozzle, that's true. I find the main culprit is if it oozes while the printer is warming up. While I'm waiting for the printer to reach temperature and the print to start, I make sure to remove any filament that might be dribbling out the nozzle using pliers or a wire brush until either the print starts or the nozzle pressure decreases enough for the oozing to stop. As long as the nozzle is clean when the print starts, it shouldn't have an opportunity gather up more material during the print. On the other hand, when 3D printing, getting off to an imperfect start will always tend to snowball toward a terrible end.
Good luck!
> While I'm waiting for the printer to reach temperature and the print to start, I make sure to remove any filament that might be dribbling out the nozzle using pliers or a wire brush until either the print starts or the nozzle pressure decreases enough for the oozing to stop.
Yeeeeppp, been doing that exact same thing, and it was working quite well. But not going to lie, I felt a bit destroyed on the inside when I still got the nozzle clogging issue about 10 hours into a 16hr print I had going. I wrote it off as a one-off, but I have been hesitant to try another 16hr-long print with PETG since then (until i at least get the textured sheet set up).
Thanks for your comments in this thread btw, they definitely highlighted quite a lot of issues I had and potential workarounds.
If these aren't in SDL, but are some format Blender can open, then Blender can turn them into SDL. It looks from the description like it's compatible with Blender.
0-https://github.com/openai/shap-e/blob/main/shap_e/examples/s...