Bits, Please! Ep 5: Half off 3d printed inserts

0:00 we're going to need a bigger printer what do you do when you want to print a 3d insert for your board game but the pieces are too big to fit on your printer bet well that exact thing happened to me when i went to print a 3d insert for a feast for odin and the expansion the norwegians and i'm going to be showing you a couple of ways to take a 3d model and split it in half so that those pieces will fit on your bed and you can print them no problem that's happening right now on this episode of bits please once i started getting into the hobby of 3d printing i became keenly aware that i was just producing more plastic cruft to gum up the environment so i wanted to make sure that with each project i tackle i was producing something that i would get use out of that's why i like to start off bits please episodes by illustrating the problem maybe so i can justify the project but first how do you justify supporting knights around a table on patreon you know how do you make it right well that's simple you just press ctrl r command r on a mac so this is the problem this is a game called a feast for odin and its expansion the norwegians is by a game developer called uva rosenberg and uber rosenberg games are famous for having a bazillion different wood pieces and cardboard pieces and cards chits tokens just stuff everywhere look this is why the box is so thick and usually uber rosenberg games don't have any sort of insert to speak of so i'll show you another uber rosenberg game that i own this one's called aura elibora i'll show you solution that a lot of uber rosenberg game owners gravitate towards this is called a plano

1:33 box so as you know like a thing that you'd put maybe a tackle or pieces for jewelry making in and it holds all the myriad chits that you need to play the game and that's it's fine it's serviceable but it's nothing like having a custom tailor-made insert to fit every piece exactly and beautifully by the time they developed a feast for odin they had anticipated the need for some sort of storage solution but they didn't want to blow the bank publishing anything that would fit the game really nicely that's money and that eats into your overhead as a publisher so what they did is they gave you one of these with the game this is a component tray that you might be familiar with if you play war games and i don't really play war games you know stuff like from publishers like gmt this is a component holder you can put a whole pile of flat chits in one thing that bugs me about this is that it's molded in plastic but it doesn't have scooped bottoms and that's one of the big advantages that a plastic insert can give you it can give you scoop bottoms so it's easier to dig stuff out with your fingers the other problem i have with the solution is that all the chits need to go in here and they need to be flipped to a certain side so all the greens need to go into this row and all the blues need to go into this row but the tiles are double-sided and they flip over really really easily inside these buckets so especially when you're just learning the game it can be hard to fish them out in the proper side and to really be reinforcing that there's like a color hierarchy system to the game this just kind of drives me nuts there has to be a better way so let's check out

3:04 thingyverse.com and see if anybody's designed anything to fix this problem as usual what we're hunting for is the gold standard of custom printed 3d inserts for board games we're looking for something that fits the base game and its expansions in the original game box with no box left box lift is where the insert doesn't quite fit everything so they made it a bit taller than the box and the lid fits a few millimeters or a few centimeters higher than it should all right we know what we're after to thingieverse so let's see here we got this one a feast roden but it doesn't look like it fits the expansion aha but this one says it fits the base game and the expansion in norwegians and look at that it looks pretty good so this one that fits the norwegians is by stink foot 71 and it is a remix of this original one which was designed by cn peters so i did download this one but the problem is as soon as i put the first piece into my slicer look it doesn't fit my printer bed but that's the problem that i'm here to help you solve so let's download a piece of software called blender and get cracking so here we are in blender 2.9.2 and for my money this is the best free piece of software i think you could possibly get your hands on you left click to get rid of this screen and you're left with the 3d world you see the x-axis the red line going along here and the y-axis going on here we're missing the blue axis that goes up and down that's zed the first thing i'm going to do is i'm just going to hit a key and go down to screencast

4:34 key so that you can see which buttons i'm pushing to do what i'm doing so this thing right here is a cube and we don't need it if you click over here it deselects the cube click on the cube to select it and hit delete and there it goes now like a lot of pieces of software blender has a native file format and we don't want to mess with that native file format that's what you get when you hit file open we actually want to import a non-native file format because that's the sort of file that it people save to when they put things up on thingiverse because it's more generic it can be used in a bunch of different 3d pieces of software so it's called an stl file so we want to go down to import stl and from the list pick the big piece that won't fit on the printer you won't see it necessarily right away but we can see the edges of it up here because it's gigantic and in order to see the whole thing we have to scroll the middle mouse wheel and pull out like that and now we can see that whole piece that won't fit on the printer bed if i hold down my middle mouse wheel and move the mouse around i can actually rotate this in 3d space i'm not actually rotating the piece i'm just rotating the entire world so i can see see it at different angles now there's a bunch of different ways that we could possibly split this up into two halves but i think that i've struck upon probably the fastest way that i can think of if you can think of a faster way to do this please let me know down in the comments but what we're going to do is we're going to create a plane which is just a flat 3d object and we're going to use it sort of like a cheese knife to slice down through the middle of this object and cut it into two halves

6:05 so to do that we have to hit shift a go to mesh and select plane you can't see it but if you scroll right in there's the plane that we're talking about if you see it it's sort of like flat or parallel to the rest of the piece which is what we don't want we want it sort of up on its end so it can slice through the piece so to do that we're gonna have to rotate it which way are we gonna have to rotate it well along this green line if you picture this as like a teeter-totter and that's the fulcrum in the middle of the teeter-totter that's how we want it to rotate so do that we hit r we want to rotate it 90 degrees around the y so if we type y it'll constrain it to that axis and you can see the y axis light up then type 90 and enter and boom it just rotates it the exact way we want now it's a little bit small of course it's going to cut a very small piece of cheese so if you hit s to scale it and just move your mouse a bunch until it gets big enough we want to make sure it goes all the way through the piece look at that and you can picture that's kind of like a like a cheese knife beautiful now to actually do the cutting we're going to use what's called a boolean modifier which is where you can use one shape to cut into another and then keep either one half or the other or the difference or the union between those two shapes so grab our boolean modifier go over here to the wrench and click add modifier there's a bunch of different ones you can choose from but in the second column you want to choose boolean and then it wants to know which object we want to perform this boolean operation with so click on the eyedropper tool

7:35 and select our big piece that we're trying to cut now you won't see anything happen but stuff is happening in the background you want to hit intersect and now what you see is just half of that big piece is highlighted and one reason why you see the other half of the piece is because that original piece that we're trying to cut is still there in the 3d world if we hide it we won't see that anymore and all we'll see is this half piece so click on the original piece and hit the h key and that hides it and what we're left with look at that is exactly half of the piece which will hopefully fit on our printer bed so if you select it we want to get it out of blender as an stl file so go up to file hit export stl find out where you're going to put it i'm going to call it half bottom and then i like to hit selection only because that allows you if you have a bunch of different things in your 3d world and you just want to export one you select it and if you hit selection only you'll only get an stl file without one thing so hit export sdl and then over in your slicer i use ultimaker cura hit file open files and choose that piece that you just made and look at that it's it's tight it's tight but at half it's when we cut it in half that half just barely fits on the bed if we were to put a skirt around this it would not

9:06 fit so make sure you've got skirt disabled you can do that over here in advance settings by hitting skirt so watch this if i put a skirt on it like forget about it it's not going to fit but as long as i get rid of everything none we go to none raft isn't going to do it brim's not going to do it as long as you've got nothing extra it will just barely squeak in there great but how do we get the other half well back in blender we go back to hit difference this is what was actually going on before we hid that other piece that's what the difference effect looks like and we want to see the other half and we can do that by taking this plane and rotating it to face the opposite direction so we're going to rotate it 180 degrees around the z axis remember the z axis that we can't see the blue invisible blue line is going to go straight up and down through the middle and you can sort of see that up here you can picture the z going up and down so if i hit r constrain it to z by typing z and then type 180 and enter now it's facing the exact opposite direction and if we go back to intersect look at that it's the other half of the piece that we wanted so just like the first time file export stl this time we'll call it half bottom two and in cura we'll get rid of this one open half bottom two and there it is now you can print both of these pieces and fit them on your printer so let me show you another way to easily cut your model if you don't want to mess

10:37 around with blender although i do recommend learning some stuff in blender so that you can eventually maybe create your own stuff this is a free piece of slicing software called prusa slicer let me go to file import and bring in that big stl that won't fit on our printer bed now prusa slicer has a feature called cut you can move this little square around and cut your object but notice how it's not really proposing to cut along the axis that we needed to cut along we don't need this to cut in half like that we need to cut in half the other way so that we can you know make two halves and fit them on our printer bed so what we have to do is rotate the piece first select the piece and click this rotate button then you get this big orbital rotator so you can go along the x-axis to rotate it like that or you can go along the z-axis to rotate it like that i'm going to hit ctrl z to undo both of those because we don't really want to free rotate we want to rotate exactly 90 degrees along the blue axis whatever this piece of software wants to call that let's try along here is that it nope let's try there we go so that's up where we want it now if we hit the cut button i don't want to touch it it's exactly in

12:08 the middle and i want to just perform cut boom there they both are they're independently selectable and i can negative 90 to put that back flat to the bed but there you go i would just you know delete this one print this one and then undo control z delete this one print this one and you're off to the races now the joke was on me because i should have checked the remixes section on thingiverse first if i had i would have discovered that someone named kind s had already made a split up version of that first tray so all my efforts were for naught but i still think it's worth going through the motions and showing you how to do it in this episode because you're not always going to have kindness to bail you out splitting up big models so that they fit your printer bed is a great skill to have i had this beautiful roll of blue pla that i wanted to use for this project but i didn't quite have enough of it so i thought i would split it between green and blue so that i could sort of match the colors on those island boards as i was printing the very last piece of the insert i was getting down to the end of the roll of blue you could see like the single strands of pla going around the spool so i was like oh where am i going to get more blue i had cut two ends off the piece for some other project so i thought oh i'll splice those in there so i stuck in one through the extruder and then another one right after that and

13:39 that's why while this model is printing you can see those two lines those clear demarcation lines where it switched there's a little bit of a gap and it ate up the next segment of blue plastic and then following the blue i fed the green in but i was hoping that i had just enough blue to print out this last little viking player holder let's watch what happened as it got down to 98 percent through this print job right there 99 is the green is has reached the hot end it's it's got about what two inches to go before it reaches the nozzle will we see green oh are we seeing green now we are we're seeing the tiniest little bit of green at the top oh no oh the last what layer two layers are gonna be green so close we needed like an inch more plastic ladies and gentlemen oh look at that yeah it was so close there's like two layers of green on top and just on these two sections too that's okay i still think it looks pretty cool well now that we've got all the pieces printed let's assemble the insert for our feast for odin and the norwegians

15:17 so there it is that's how it looks when you're all finished this is a very very nice insert i'll take a couple trays out to show you everything's really neatly organized all of those tiles are the right way up so that you can see the different you know bands of color the orange and the red and the green and blue the way that they're supposed to be the strata of powerful objects now one thing i will say is that it's not as easy as just chucking these tiles in one of those component trays right you have to sort of meticulously stack each one and it can be a little bit fiddly to put it away after a game's done that's for sure but it's a trade-off for having them so nicely organized one complaint i do have though is that this tray which purports to fit all of your islands if i can get it out there we go it's actually too high the islands go over the edge of it and that's because in different printings they use different thicknesses of stock so in the printing that i have i just had thicker stock on those islands and they don't quite fit but that's okay because once again if we check the remixes on thingiverse user victorium has modified this file so that it's a bit deeper and fits all of those island boards plus i believe the islands you get as the mini expansions for the games but i haven't printed that one out so i can't vouch for it another thing you'll find if you look in the remixes is that user gormash found that he has little stickers to bling out his vikings and with the stickers on the vikings it makes them thicker and they just it's a

16:48 tight fit in here that you squeeze them into these component trays so gourmash has a remix on thingiverse that you can print that gives a little bit more space to those vikings and finally if you're fortunate enough to have the mini expansions for this game there are a few extra components and they don't fit in this thing as design but there are remixes that you can find on thingiverse like this one from sil fire that will enable you to fit all the mini expansion stuff into a redesigned container one more comment i'll make is that i wish and this is going to sound super greedy because these designers nobody's paying them you grab the stuff of thingiverse for free so i feel like a bit of a rat saying it but i wish that more designers would make keys or legends that you could print out and stick in with the board game because figuring out how to put all of these trays back in the box can be it's a little bit of like a like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces can fit each other but they'll only fit one way you know what i'm saying so maybe it's sort of like a side project i might actually work on a little key that you can print out and stick in there it shows you how to put everything back in that's it what a project i highly recommend it if you have a 3d printer and you own this game it makes setup a breeze not necessarily tear down but certainly set up is a breeze and i hope i helped you out by showing you how you can split stuff up to make it fit your printer bed if you would like to see a parody of this insert yes a parody of a 3d board game insert isn't that a deep cut then you got to check out this brothers murph episode where they satirize putting all your components into a heavily designed over designed 3d board

18:20 game insert just so i thought it was really funny check it out thanks for watching this one and we'll catch you next time on did you just watch that whole thing oh hey to 100 this video click the badge to subscribe and then click the bell to get notifications when i've got new stuff