Autodesk Print Studio - 3D printing not only from Inventor

One of the new functions in Inventor 2016 and Inventor LT 2016 is the direct 3D print environment. Any created or associated model from other CAD formats can be printed from Inventor on a connected 3D printer, or a STL file can be generated for a custom 3D print service. You can modify - independently on the editing of the original model - the orientation and placement of the model before you print it, or you can split the model to multiple printable parts. An auxiliar geometry of the selected printer is created in the browser tree.

Besides the direct 3D printing, you can also forward your model through the ribbon function to the Autodesk Print Studio application. You have to install it before its first usage from the offered link. Print Studio is a part of the 3D print platform Autodesk Spark, which contains not only software componens for 3D printing but also a reference device - the 3D printer Autodesk Ember. The Spark Server (on port http://localhost:9998) is installed with the Print Studio application, so other print jobs can be directed through it.

In the Print Studio application, you can select the type of 3D printer, print material, precision, types of supports and detailed parameters of print layers (time, velocity, geometry...). The print preparation functions allow to check and fix or cleanup model geometry (holes), place the supports manually or automatically, set exact size, placement and rotation of the model of the 3D printer bed. You can also export the individual print layer slices as a series of PNG images. The settings combinations can be stored as print profiles.

You can also use Autodesk Print Studio separately, to preprocess any STL or ONJ file before printing. So you can e.g. load a STL file (parametric surface Enneper from 3DPlot) and add automatic supports:

You can also download the free Autodesk Print Studio from cadstudio.cz/download