I’ve been getting into 3d printing lately. I have a makerbot replicator 2 and love it. Here is a list of some of the tools I’d recommend picking up if you would like to create custom models from scratch:
- Digital Calipers - used to measure dimenions of physical objects ie diameter of a cylinder
- Ruler
- Notebook - for skething, I like the Rhodia brand b/c their graph paper has 5mm squares
- Google Sketchup - free software software for creating models
- STL export plugin for sketchup - if you go the Sketchup route you're going to need this plugin to export files the printer can read