Hallo Steemians,
Being a professional 3D designer made me realize how little people still know about 3D printing. It also made me realize that people usually don’t care about long explanations, using technical terms and going into process details. In University students always talk about the history of 3D printing, but even that is far from valuable information for the average person. In the following summarize the important things to know about 3D printing. Further technical information will follow in the future.

Overview

3D Printing means creating 3 dimensional object through adding several layers of material. There are a lot of different 3D printing processes with more to come in the future. The available materials vary from process to process, ranging from ABS plastic (LEGO) to gold or titan. The research of new printable materials is even higher valued than the research on new machines. The printing file needs to be a printable 3D object. Therefore a 2D file like a pdf won’t work. Keep in mind that the actual printing process will take some time.

FFF-printer in action

Why 3D printing?

It enables you to create objects in otherwise impossible shapes. Through tweaking the machine code with a so called slicer software you can give the object very specific customized characteristics. This means 3D printing beats the conventional manufacturing methods.in many ways.

Customization is the biggest strength of 3D printing.

3D print of a prosthesis cover

Who is the target group?

3D printing is great for prototyping, spareparts, jewelry, modelling, customized tools, toys or give aways and much more. Of course you can use 3D printing in pharmacy and medicine, car, aircraft and ship engineering, but let’s get into industrial 3D printing on another day.

3D printing may be useful for any artistic (except painting of course), modelling or prototyping purpose.

example of a dental print

How does a complete creation process look like?

At first you need an idea. Then you turn your idea into a 3D object using a CAD Software (computer aided design). This will probably consume the most time depending on the magnitude of your idea. At this point you might already consider which printing process and material you will use, because it can greatly influence the way you need to design the object.
Now that you have your 3D file it needs to be converted into machine code. Slicer software like Simplify3D will help you with that. Transfer the machine code to your printer and start printing.

You only have an idea, but nothing else?

It is also possible to download already printable designs from websites like thingiverse, where you can also find my crypto coin designs. Or just hire 3D designers, like myself ;-).

If you don’t have access to a printing machine, you can use 3D printing agencies or online services.