The letter I (Interiors)

Today, Ladies and Gentleman, we will talk about the letter I.

Interiors

I hadn't though much about, or done much with, interiors for a while now, but I recently have had a few requests so I will delve in the the production briefly.

Tolerances: If you have your own printer and use it frequently, you probably already know what is do able and what is not, but interior applications pose a few new challenges because the thin interior walls are largely unsupported, especially in a cathedral ceiling situation.
I would suggest using at least your printers minimum unsupported tolerance for the interior walls and "beef up" your exterior walls to make sure you do not end up with breakage during the removal of support structure.

For those of you not printing your parts, contact your local service provider for guidelines on the thicknesses of your walls, or have the make the necessary adjustments.

Doors: Make sure the doors touch the door frame and preferably the floor

Windows: If you are printing in color just go ahead and make the windows flush with the mullions and "fatten" the whole casing to ensure it has proper thickness because you can differentiate the parts with colors or shades.
If you are printing in monochrome I would suggest deleting the glazing and "fattening" the mullions. I did this on the last set of interior models and it looked amazing.

Fixtures: Here comes the hard part. Where to de-feature and where to "beef up"? A lot of this discussion centers around the scale of the model. My suggestion for guiding principals has to do with triangles. If deleting the item drastically reduces the triangle count for the model without being noticed I would absolutely delete it. Ex: door handles and other hardware should almost always go.

Stacking: If you have a multistory building and would like cutaways for each floor, I would suggest some form of alignment pins which may be difficult if you are choosing a small scale that is already pressing the bounds of your printer's tolerances. Just remember to offset the socket to allow for swelling of the pin.

Sorry I have no pictures for you at this time because of NDAs.