3D Design for 3D Printing

Good design always occurs within the context and confines of the medium. And Designing for 3D Printing is no different.

Theoretically you could 3D print any shape or form, at any size. But it's in the layered process of 3D Printing that the rubber often meets the road. Imagine an ink jet printer that does not just put down one layer of ink, but it keeps going over the sheet of paper countless times and it prints something slightly different each time until the built up ink grows into a 3 dimensional blob. Now you have the basic concept of a 3d Printer.

Issue is: You can only print on top of a previously deposited layer, and with complex shapes there just might not be anything printed below yet. Sure you can solve this with added supports and other gizmo's, but before you know it you waste more material on these work-arounds than the model you want to print itself. And your print might still fail.

And there are quite a few more of these quirks involved in 3D Printing. Not enough base surface on the model, or area's that are too thin can cause all kinds of issue's.

That's why it is more beneficial to work with designs specifically developed for 3D Printing. Designs that take into account the specific 3D Printing processes, and try to minimize the amount of cheats and tricks you need to get to a successful print, so you save on material, printing time and avoid post processing nightmares.

For most models we design on request, we do test prints and iterate the design for optimal printing, so you may cook something else than "Spaghetti" on your printer bed.