Action camera mount, part 5: Export, share, and collaborate

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Welcome to another Shapr3D tutorial. My name is Andrew Camardella. I'm an industrial design consultant and professor of design at DePaul University. In this video, we're going to continue taking a look at our action camera mount and focus on how Shapr3D has a bunch of different tools that allow you to export, output, and share 3D models. The last time we worked on the action camera mount, we had just finished up modeling all of the new features and modifications, and we want to validate that in the 3D printer. So we're going to focus on exporting this model.

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to the 3D printer first. If I click file, export to, I get this menu here that has a bunch of different file formats that allows us to export. If we click export here or control shift E, it brings up this menu. This menu has a lot of explanation as to what those individual file formats are, as well as categorizing what those file formats are good for. So for example, we want to go to 3D printing. We have two options. We have STL or 3MF. STL is kind of the standard.

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3D file format that we've seen for a really long time in 3D printing. 3MF is a more modern format that stores a bunch of different things like color and also allows you to adjust those parts individually depending on the software you're using. I'm going to choose 3MF here and Shapr3D does a good job of laying out all the various options. My resolution is going to be high, so that really refers to how big the polygons are that are going to make up that 3D model. I don't have any mesh bodies in here.

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I don't care about including hidden items, but I could if I had a bunch of hidden items that those would all be present in the model. And then I can also save each item separately in their own individual files. I want these all together in one file called action camera mount. So I'm going to click export. It's going to bring up my save dialog. I've already saved a copy here, but I'm going to open up my slicer software now and I'm going to import that model. And it comes into the bottom corner.

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And what I'd like to do is orient all of these parts so that we get the best 3D printing structure for these parts. So I'm going to select the bottom faces for our printing purposes. And that way our features that we care about are actually going to show up properly. I like to rotate this through. And the other thing is that this part that we created is the same and it's been copied.

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three times. So I'm just going to take this part here and I'm going to copy and paste it a few times. The other thing is I want to make sure that this is right side up and we want to have these tines facing up so that they don't get any support material underneath them. So that looks about right to me. We can sort of adjust these a little bit more, but otherwise, I think we're ready to slice the plate and there we go.

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So now our parts are ready to print and I am going to send this over to our printer.

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So with the parts off the printer, you can actually see that the layer lines printed in the correct orientation. So we have all the structure going in the right direction. The other thing is that I started test fitting these parts together, and this is a really nice interference fit. So I can't get this part back apart, but we get all of the printed structure in the right orientation for these tines as well. And then I can assemble these parts together and that way I can get a nice solid connection. I can mount this.

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to a board or something like that. And you can see that all the tolerance changes that we made in previous videos work really nicely. I did change the material here too to be PETG and that really helps with the flexibility of the part. But you can see that everything works out really nicely. Let's go look at other options that Shapr3D gives us for outputting and sharing this 3D model. Getting back into the modeling environment, you'll see that in the upper right corner, there's this share button.

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And there are two menus that pop up here. One is share, which allows you to have a URL link for a 3D model that you can share and collaborate with. And the other is the export project button, which brings up the same export menu that we had before. So when I click share, you'll see that there's this bottom button here that says share link. When I click on that, it's going to create a link so that I can then provide that URL to anybody to be able to access. And I can control the access and change various sharing options as well.

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So I'm going to just copy this link right now. I'm going to put that link in the URL.

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And there you go. You have a 3D model that you can browse online, and this is hosted for you so that you can then share this with anybody that you want, have people add comments and things like that. The other nice thing is that you can also include materials here. So if we go over to our visualizations tab, I'm just going to select all the components like that. I'm going to click change and I'm going to apply a single material here. I'm going to go to plastic glossy ABS.

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and we're going to change that to be blue. Now we have materials applied to all of the components, and I can then click here and click publish changes. And what that's going to do is update my online model. If I switch over to our browser view and I refresh the browser, you'll see that the materials are now updated and it provides a high-quality rendered view in this model here.

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If you scan this QR code, you'll be able to view this model on your phone, but also get an augmented reality view that allows you to overlay the 3D model in physical space. We're going to switch over to phone mode and we're going to scan this QR code. You can see that this web link pops up, and that gives us the ability to take a look at this model and zoom around and look at it with the materials that we've applied to it. But if you click on the top here where it says AR,

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What we'll see is that we can actually

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scan the surface of the table a little bit and we can actually get a pretty decent view of this part, and it seems to be even to scale for what we're looking at. The other thing that you can do is increase the scale of it, zoom it back down, and we can also move it around. So if we wanted to move this part around and be able to look at it, it actually shows us those pieces next to each other.

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And they look pretty similar. Jumping back into the modeling environment, we can also share a variety of other file formats. So we can go to our export project menu. And if I click on 3D model, we have a bunch of other 3D formats here. And if we click on them, Shapr3D does a good job of telling us what this file is good for. So Parasolid files are good for these types of software here and being able to interchange between them.

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We can also do STEP and IGES. I am a big fan of IGES in terms of interoperability with other software. So I'm going to export a version of that.

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And again, I'm going to save this out as an IGES here. And I'm going to open up Fusion.

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And I'm going to upload that file. So I'm going to select my file.

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Going to open my IGES and I'm going to upload it. I can go to my save location here and I can click into this file here.

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And there you go. So now we have our 3D modeled part inside of another piece of software. And this is entirely editable. So inside of Fusion, I can very easily start to do operations. So for example, if I wanted to start filleting this edge, I could do that. And I could share this with somebody who maybe doesn't have Shapr3D but wants to use Fusion instead.

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The other thing that we can take a look at here is that we have all of our bodies. So our individual bodies are preserved and we can turn these on and off inside of Fusion as well. Let's get back into Shapr3D now and I'm going to share one other file format here. So if I click on the export button, I can go to AR, and there are these two file formats. I am going to select GLB here and I'm going to embed this inside of a website.

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So that I don't actually have to share the link and somebody could come visit my website and just look at this model. So I'm going to include mesh bodies. I can turn this off because I don't have any in there. I could also go to include visualization materials, and that should give me the colors and everything that I've selected. I'm going to call this again, action camera mount, and I'm going to hit export. With that, it's going to save out a new file.

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It's going to drop it into my folder and I can now go over to my website. I have a WordPress website set up and I'm using the 3D viewer plugin here. It's a basic 3D viewer plugin, but it takes a GLB as an input. So I have the plugin loaded right here and what I can do is I can upload my file, and I'm going to select that file there.

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And I am going to update this particular 3D viewer. And the plugin allows me to take this shortcode here and drop it into a page, and I can save that page. And I can also then go view it, and I will have a 3D model that's living inside of my webpage. And so this is

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Obviously not linked directly to the Shapr3D website, so if I change the model I'll have to re-upload it. But this is a really quick way of then showing somebody this model and being able to embed it inside of a webpage. And that finishes up our tutorial for going over the core functionality to share and output 3D models within Shapr3D. See you next time!