When you wish to print out a part on a 3D printer the workflow is simple – design the part, export to STL and print it. This is fine when you are only printing with a single material or color. Becoming increasingly popular and affordable are 3D printers that support printing with two or three colors/materials at once, such as the Prusa Mendel from RepRapPro. How can Alibre Design be used for this scenario?

In general the easiest way to allocate different colors/materials to a part is to design that part using multiple smaller pieces. Each piece is assigned a color/material for printing. Alibre Design has a very flexible and easy to use way of grouping parts together called an assembly. What we would need therefore is a way of exporting multiple STLs from an assembly preserving their relationships to one another.

For example, suppose we have a cube and a pyramid and we wanted to place the pyramid on top of the cube and print it in a different color to the cube. We would design the cube and pyramid as two parts then use an assembly to stack the pyramid on top of the cube. Now we need to export the two STLs preserving their position relative to the same origin. This would allow the 3D slicing software to know to stack the pyramid on top of the cube. This is where the problems start.

Alibre Design supports exporting an assembly to a single STL. It merges all the parts together and produces a single object. Information about the individual parts is lost, so this is not usable for our purposes. If you export an individual part or you hide/suppress parts in an assembly then Alibre Design exports the STL using the position and origin in the part file not the assembly, causing the position information to be lost.

An additional problem is the units used in STL files are not defined. If you create a part using centimeters then Alibre Design exports an STL that uses centimeters. Likewise if you create a part using inches then the STL uses inches. The problem is that most, if not all, 3D slicing software assumes the units are millimeters. Solving this for a single part is easy – simply change the units used to millimeters before exporting. However an assembly can be made from multiple parts that all use different units. Regardless of the units chosen for the assembly the STL export will always use the units the part was designed with.

There is one more issue that needs to be addressed. When creating an assembly parts become rotated but the final positions may not be the best for 3D printing. Consider the lid for a box. When creating the assembly it will be rotated so the top is facing upwards but the optimal orientation for printing is probably for the top to be facing downwards onto the build surface. Currently the easiest way to rotate an assembly is to place it into a new assembly as a sub-assembly. This creates an unnecessary extra file and step to perform.

Fortunately Alibre Design has an easy to use API that allows these problems to be solved and I present here my free utility with an exciting name: AD Assembly Exporter.

To use start the application and Alibre Design and open an assembly. In the assembly you can optionally hide/suppress parts you do not want to export. The name of the assembly will be shown in the title bar of the AD Assembly Exporter application. Enter the desired settings and click on the Generate STLs button.

The utility supports forcing the units in STLs to millimeters and rotation around an axis. The STL export options match those found in Alibre Design so please see the Alibre Design manual for a description of what they do. Sub-assembly nesting is supported.

Only open one assembly at a time when using the utility. It will export the first assembly found from your open Alibre Design sessions.

Please note that this software is provided “as-is”. More details can be found in the license shown during installation.

Click here to download AD Assembly Exporter (now called WizoPrint)