Inventor: Preparing an assembly for 3D printing with dual head extraction

[christian.postma]

Hi all,

I am currently in the process of finding out how to use our Ultimaker 3 printer with dual extractors to print something consisting of 2 materials or colors.

For this project I have an assembly that consists of two semicircles, forming one complete disk together. Each of the halves needs to be printed by a different printhead, in one go.

In Cura I can load the two STL's and then choose 'merge models' to connect the two halves together and then determine which part should be printed through which head.

This requires that the two STLs maintain the same alignment as in the assembly. Otherwise Cura doesn't understand where the two parts should touch. Now I can't manage to export a different center point than the center of the whole body from the 3D print environment. Which in Cura results in overlapping parts and makes the 'merge models' function unusable.

Assembly and the exports of two parts as STL's.

Importing the two parts in Cura shows them like this, but 'merge models' gives a wrong position:

  

Is there a way to set the position and orientation relative to each other in Inventor's STL export?

Version of Cura seems not to make a difference.

How do I solve this? All suggestions are welcome.

Thanks

Christian

[mcgyvr · Accepted solution]

I simply opened your assembly, did a file..export cad format and selected STL and "One file per instance" in the file structure option then saved.. 

Then I opened both of those parts in CURA and assigned the extruder heads as needed then selected both parts and did the merge and it worked just fine for me..

[mcgyvr]

Just noticed I probably had it upside down on the build plate.. Even so.. Was able to easily select the faces to align to plate and voila.. 

[SharkDesign]

When I've had issues like this, I put the file into an empty assembly, place it exactly where I want it and export it from there. 

[Frederick_Law]

As other replied, export assembly to single STL

[christian.postma]

Thanks a million @mcgyvr! This actually did it!

Never were aware of this workflow as i am always using the 3d Print environment and simply just did not pay attention to the "one file per instance" setting under structure thus exporting 2 separate STL's, which of course have no reference to each other if I do it like that.

Very nice, thanks!