Unify unit systems troughout all of blender .
People use blender beyond animations these days. And more often people use it in production, so now that blender gets grown up. It should also serve the other areas good, ea the 3D printing, and normal printing areas.
Currently i'm in a drawing blender 2.8x to get it all correctly I had to put the world to metrics (under scene units). The Measureit addon returns meters ( ea 45.00 m) The final STL export (using scale 1) makes it 45 mm My goal was to work in mm but i had to put blender to meters otherwise the 3d prints would have been way to small.
Similairly when one has set a unit size and add a new cube starting on a object its a real tiny cube (in a meter world it should be 2 meter wide, in a milimeter it should be 2 millimeter wide.
The same kind of problems, we got with DPI, i work with optics and machinery prototyping. So sometimes i need something to be printed at 1200DPI (or 600 or 300) now there is some addon (i've heard) to solve the DPI (although its not set in the TIFF field), but i think it should be a normal part of the scene units pannel to be able to provide such settings and have them working troughout your pipeline. (ea not requiring irfranview to alter DPI values afterwards).
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This problem also exists when you try to do exact measurement objects inside Blender. What CAD software usually does is abstract their units system from any hard coded values, only caring about those when you convert it to a format such as STL.
There's quite a few conversations about STL units on BlenderArtists. The problem is this - STL is unit agnostic. 1 unit in an STL file is completely arbitrary. Most slicers take 1 unit = 1 mm. Blender when set to metric will export 1 unit = 1 meter. It's really not a limitation of Blender, rather of the file format.
Solution: Use the STL exporter (Not the one in the 3D Print Tools plug int) and set the scale option to 1000. Easy!
For printing DPI you might want to try this Print to Render plug in.
* @ammusionist * Well I did use the file exporter from Blender, so its problematic.. The plugin i only use for manifold errors (ea shapes that cannot exist in real 3d space)
* @peter.boos * If you are setting the STL scale to 1000 then you should model back in mm! (If you make a 45m high model and export it with a scale of 1000 the slicer will try to slice it as a 45m model!)
I prefer to work in real life (metric) units in Blender and then let the scaling take care of the STL quirks.
Incidentally - Using Ender 3 with Cura 4.2. You?
* @ammusionist * i dont set the STL scale, to my knowledge there are no 3d printers that could print 45meter models, what i'm asking is that Blender should get a proper unfied unit system, if i set it to mm i get way to small objects (not visible in the printing software).
* @peter.boos * I think you're missing my point. STL Does not carry units. It's a limitation of the file format. It's up to each different package to make up its own mind as to what 1 "Unit" equals.
For Blender 1 STL Unit = 1 Blender Unit (Which is 1 Meter if you have Metric turned on)
For most slicers 1 STL Unit = 1mm
The STL Exporter allows you to scale the units so you can adapt to the limitation.
(eg: a 45mm model in Blender will be 0.45 STL Units. When you scale this up on export by 1000 it becomes 45.0 STL Units. When you import this into Cura, the slicer interprets this as 45mm)
Once again - The limitation is not in Blender it's in the STL File format.
* @ammusionist * Well then a default 1000 can be set (as blender should be friendly to all new starters). In the world of thinkerers constructors (those who use 3d printers) the mm is kinda standard.