3D printing sizes from Blender files

One of the first things I changed in my defaults was units to mm, scale to 0.001 and grid to 0.001 - had no issues with blender, various slicers and other design software.

Very helpful video. I’ve been puzzling over this units issue for a while now. This explained it neat and sweet. Thanks!

Blender units was a mystery to me, now everything is clear thanks to you

This is very helpful to know. I have worked in Blender for years and never knew why this happened. Thanks to this video I can understand how to not have the itty bitty problem when importing to slicers. Awesome and thanks :)

I was trying to figure out scale relative to units in blender and this is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

Converted to Blender units! Thankyou so much! I only work in mm and it's now perfect. I'd messed around with changing scale and units to 0.001 etc. but some addons only work in meters when set to mm. Even bolt factory and punchit works properly now! Brilliant! Orca slicer gave a slightly annoying "do you want to convert to mm on every import" and even that's gone. Love the "I'm not a savage" comment! I worked for two American companies before I retired - the last one made things in the US and bought components in causing me to I travel Europe with two lots of tools and some were tiny allen keys I had use fully suited, masked and gloved... grrr... Bloody excellent. Cheers!

Don’t know how it took me so long to get to this video. Thanks vaul this is incredibly helpful

You fixed several of my problems in one video. Thank you!

Awesome video like always! Are you by any chance planning to follow this up with a video explaining your process to 3d print objects, choosing the settings you use (especially for supports) for the slicing?

Thank you so much. This was something I have been trying to get answers to and you gave the best answer.

this worked like a charm, thank you so much! I made the mistake of turning the original file I was workin on into mm and was very puzzled when it looked microscopic in size on lychee

I've never had any problem working in mm. It's floating point numbers, so scaling by 1000 doesn't affect the precision even though blender tends to truncate the lower digits on display. I've also not had to worry about the scale, because STL files don't have units anyway, so every program I use assumes they're mm. Maybe your one slicer is confused and you think that's why importing things is a problem. And of course if you're doing something like a cloth simulation to create a minifig's clothing, you need it in the right scale for the simulation too (where "right scale" would be making the minifig several meters tall). I probably haven't done as much as you, but I never noticed blender crashing or anything like that, and I just set my far clip-plane to maybe 100 meters instead of many kilometers away when I'm working in millimeters. I'm loving binging this channel. So much good info here.

Really interesting video, thanks for making it. Most of my work is exported as an stl for a CNC machine, which—like 3D printers—deals with mm as the base unit. I've never had a problem with working in mm in Blender, but have had to remember to scale models up and down as appropriate when switching to and from 3DCoat or for final export. Setting Blender's units to 'none' might be a nice simple way to simplify that part of my workflow. 👍👍

Very helpful overview, thank you

Thank you so much. This was very helpful

Brilliant! Thanks for this vid. I'm just starting out with Blender and 3d printing and the whole 'blender scale' thang was pissing me off. Especially when I add a new object to scene or fiddle around with grids.

Very useful info dude!

Thank you so much , this helped me alot

I'd argue that scale and size is always important. Even when you're doing things like still image renders; the way lenses and rendering optics work in the raytracer especially are dependent on the scale and measurements. If you're modeling a miniature/model, then the proper scale is the actual scale you want it printed, of course. But if a spaceship is actually 2km long, make it 2km long if you intend to use it as a render model. You'll just get better results in so many places. Scale it later if you decide to print your 2km spaceship (but you'll probably need to re-model it anyway to fix detail scales). That being said, the Blender thinking meters and everything else thinking mm is annoying. Blender has a built in Unit Scale feature which I've toyed with, but I don't think I tested importing into Lychee. I'll see how that works on a model I'm working on. Edit: Okay, right off the bat, switching units to 'none' and Unit Scale to 1000, it is displaying my 10cm cylinder as 0.100, so that's promising.

Thank you, I was getting suspicious about the dimensional errors occuring whilst working on small parts in mm, looks as though no units is the best option for me.