By Your Powers Combined: Exporting and Printing

As it turns out, I did have time to export and print my bookstand! Isn't that wonderful?

So as it turns out, it's not actually too difficult to print something that has been designed in Blender. Basically, what one needs to do is to export the Blender project as a .stl file. This isn't too difficult in itself, and that's just about all there is to it. A few tutorials I came across (I primarily used this one) suggested that I identify and remove "non-manifold" vertices.

To my understanding, these are vertices that essentially wouldn't work physically. I did have a couple of these on the design on the back of my bookstand, but I fixed them up. (This does mean that the design now looks a little different, but I can't/won't post any screenshots because I still can't be bothered rendering it and the change is almost impossible to see in the Blender interface itself.)

So um, have a different picture instead.

Um... this. Yes, this one.

So after fixing the non-manifold vertices (And ignoring the step where I hollow out the model because I'm lazy), the guide then suggested to me that I scale the model as if 1 Blender unit was equal to 1 millimeter, and then turn it 90 degrees on the X-axis. As I wasn't completely sure which (if either) of these steps had to be performed in order for immediate printing rather than uploading to Shapeways, I exported four versions of the bookstand, each with a different combination of these steps (none, one, or both).

As it turns out, the model did not need to be rotated and the printing software does give the option to scale the model once imported; however, the best idea would still be to scale it before exporting.

My bookstand is now printing as I write this, and should be ready by tomorrow morning! The saga is finally complete!

...Or is it?