"Unlimited Spaceship Designs" Topic

This YouTuber makes videos about the free 3D design software Blender where he challenges himself to create something in ten minutes. Pretty impressive.

YouTube link

"E to extrude, S to scale…"

But it got me wondering: add 3D printing (which works pretty well for shapes like this) and you have unlimited spaceships, both in quantity and different designs. Blender is free. This is a very simple technique. It would take you an hour to learn enough Blender to start churning out all the spaceship designs you could possibly want.

Since spaceships are made up anyway, what does this mean, never mind the market, but for the art form? Lowering the barrier to entry (and this is a quantum step) always provokes innovation.

I hope this inspires somebody.

Cool demo of blender too.

Making watertight forms that will print is far more challenging than slapping together a spaceship design in Blender. In some case, design is 60% of the time, careful work to make the shape printable is 40%. And that's with a highly experienced professional designer.

EMcKinney, not sure what you are meaning by watertight.

I've thrown together models in Autodesk and never had issues printing them on resin or fdm other than support placement.

That's because Autodesk is a CAD system and effectively automates the watertighting process.

General explanation and discussion of problems link

Autodesk watertight definition and documentation link

I've made a ton of stuff on TinkerCAD, downloaded the STL, straight to Cura, print, done. I understand "watertight" somewhat, and while a few STLs I downloaded from various places gave warnings when I brought them into Cura, they all printed okay in the end. Looking at that spaceship, I can't imagine the STL would be water tight. I have not taken anything from Blender to the printer yet, so I don't know, but I would be surprised if this was a problem.

I have only done FDM so far. I hope to try SLA later this year. Maybe it will be more of an issue there, since you need to use a different slicer. And there's something about avoiding a print that's full of liquid resin. I'll learn all that soon enough.

But I don't think this is an issue.

Thingiverse has a few spaceship builder sets. Print what you want at whatever scale and assemble how you want:
link