Many 3D printing projects seek a certain smoothness on their surfaces, requiring chemical products (acetone, putty, etc.) and almost endless sanding sessions. However, some objects can escape all that with the application of textures. The problem is that slicers don't go beyond the "fuzzy skin" mode, and special plates only inject textures into the base. The folks at 3DJake explain how to add textures to any 3D print, created from examples on the Web, and with the help of Blender.
Anyone would imagine that texture generation is a solved problem in slicers for 3D printing, but if we move to practice... the situation is not ideal. The vast majority of users agree that the "fuzzy skin" mode lacks enough flexibility, and external tricks (like special plates) are limited to the base. Fortunately, generating textures for our 3D prints is a relatively accessible process (details below), and the folks at the online store 3DJake decided to create a couple of bags as prototypes.
3D print textures: Web + Blender + time
Now, I admit it's not 100 percent beginner-friendly, since it requires some prior knowledge of Blender. Once we have the general shape of the object, the rest is a matter of creating a uniform grid across the entire surface, and repeating/printing the texture on it. There are two factors to consider here: first, that the rectangles of the grid have a similar size, otherwise the texture will be deformed. Second, that the texture extracted from the Web has the condition of being "seamless" or "without seams" so its integration is perfect.
The last step is to simplify the model. This 3DJake prototype is quite complex, with almost a million and a half triangles. The slicer in question probably won't appreciate such a level of detail, so Blender's Decimate function with a value of 0.5 should come to the rescue (this removes half of the triangles). I imagine the bags are too rigid for daily use, but I must admit their method seems to work very well.
Do you have other tricks for printing textures? Leave a comment!
