If you need clean up a 3D scan or make a 3D model ready for 3D printing, Meshmixer can help. The self-proclaimed free “Swiss Army Knife” for 3D meshes is part of the Autodesk software range for several years now and has been constantly updated with new features ever since. Oh, and it’s free, for Windows and MacOS.
With the release 3.3, Autodesk redesigned the entire 3D print workflow.
You can now easily add custom printers and use your printer software to do the actual print, or you can export your model as STL and send it to the 3rd party printing services.
Autodesk has eliminated 3rd party printing services that were not working properly and causing crashes.
They implemented a ”Customer Error Report” (CER) functionality. This report can now be sent to Autodesk when Meshmixer crashes, which will allow us to debug your issues in a more meaningful way.
Added a hotkey for toggling printer bed rendering.
You Can Now Edit and Add 3D Printers
Just to be clear, Meshmixer does not 3D print your models directly. Instead, you send your model to third-party software to handle printing. Autodesk also included the 3D printer preferences in a drop-down list of printers. Here you can view, edit, and delete existing printers, and add new ones. Clicking “Reset All Printers” will restore the default set of printers that ships with Meshmixer.
Also, you can visualize the print volume while editing your model. Here’s a video on how to send a file to the 3D printer software.
