My wife placed an order for dozens of Christmas trees, snowman, and other Christmas 3D prints. My 3D printer has been running pretty much non-stop for the last 3 weeks. For the first time I have gone through a single spool of filament in less than 24 hour window.
The primary thing I have been printing is these artistic Christmas trees in various sizes along with a mini snowman to create little dioramas for friends and family.
We picked up these wood trays and I printed trees for each of them, along with a colorful snowman. We have two scenes, one with three trees and one with five with one being lite up with a flickering tea light battery powered candle.
You can't really see the lighting effect, but it looks pretty cool at night.
The snowman were pretty annoying to build as they require super glue to glue all the parts together and the eyes and buttons are pretty difficult to line up. I could have printed them in one go, but they take a lot longer and require a lot more filament to print. I would also have had to print supports to hold up the arms while printing. I ended up printing the various pieces in batches of ten. The original model is designed to be put together with an elastic so you can pose and position them, but I decided to super glue them to a fixed position.
I also printed some new snowflakes for the Christmas tree for a few friends as well as our own tree.
All these models are freely available, and can just be downloaded and printed.
One of the awesome things about 3D printing is most of the models are freely available and filament is pretty cheap, a lot cheaper than printer ink. I typically get a 2.2lbs (1kg) spool for $11 - $20 and most models are 5g-50g. It's a very rewarding hobby that is cheaper than you might expect. While I personally prefer functional prints (prints that solve a problem in my life) but during the holidays I typically print a lot of statues and decorations.
My favorite print this holiday though are giant snowman. I've been blowing through filament printing these as they each take almost an entire spool on their own.
One of the fun things about these snowman is you can customize them. You can choose to use a scarf or a sweater, each can be printed in any color you want. You can use button or coal eyes as well as customizing the buttons. There is a wooly hat and a fancy top hat, although you can take other hats and resize them and modify them to work on this model as well. The arms are optional and I think they look good with and without the arms.
You can even just print the head and body and skip the bottom making a smaller but equally cute snowman. The bottom takes up 300g (1/3rd a spool) of filament is about 9 hours on a high speed printer. Most printers will take 2-3 times that long to print it.
This is totally doable with only the head and body, but I'd recommend putting buttons on, this was one of the earlier pictures while I was printing the first one.
This model is completely free as well, and can be downloaded and printed for free.
I made these giant snowman completely posable rather than glueing them, due to the size, it was a bit more managable to put them together. Although it is still a big pain as you got to screw two bolts in to a floating plate where you can't really hold it in place as you can't fit your arms in the bottom hole.
A full size giant snowman with all accessories takes around 20 hours to print on my printer and just under 1000g (1 spool or 2.2 lbs of plastic) of filament. The total cost to make one of these is roughly $12 between electricity and filament costs. They are super popular and could easily sell for $50+ if I was to put them up for sale.
This year I printed a lot of gifts like this amazing zebra print for a friend who loves zebras, and some Star Wars shadow boxes.
Even 3D printing some mechanical gift boxes for gift cards.
If you are interested in 3D printing, expect to spend $100-$1,500 on a printer, with most good printers starting around $500 and a printer like mine running around $1,500. Generally most printers can print similar results, but the more you spend the fewer problems you have and the more consistency you can expect. The Ender 3 is a very popular printer that can be had for $100-300 but is plagued with reliability issues, but is a very capable printer when working well.
I use a Bambu X1C w/ AMS (multi color unit). It cost me $1,500 and allows me to print up to 16 colors in a single print. Although I only have one AMS unit which limits me to four colors and I usually only print one color at a time, and just glue pieces together. Although I will do multi color prints when it doesn't require hundreds of color swaps like these.
There are a lot of clever tricks you can do with 3D printing, like this coaster was printed on a textured plate faced down to give it a textured look, the giant snowman I printed with fuzzy skin to give it a snow like finish. You can even print unique materials like wood, carbon fiber, glow in the dark, and so on.
