Ashley Webster shared these lovely photos of his weekend project on the 3D Printing google+ community. His goal was to make a simple box and print it as interesting as possible. That lovely looking sheen on the bottom of the part is printed on the build plate. We tend to get similar results when printing in ABS on a heated build plate with kapton tape but Ashley is using PLA. Using a 1:10 pva solution, he painted on a layer to his build plate and let it dry.

The real beautify lies on how the part was sliced and printed. Using Simplify3D, Ashley sliced the bottom half of the box using 4 processes (4 sets of different slice settings). All at 0.2mm layers.

I used Simplify3D. The bottom half of the box uses 4 processes (4 sets of different slice settings). All at 0.2mm layers.

0-1.2mm: Concentric infill, 0.6mm width

1.2-1.6mm: two layers of rectilinear infill to close a small gap at the center of the concentric infill and make the bottom watertight.

1.6-2mm: two layers same as first set

2mm+: 0.45mm filament width and rectilinear infill, because concentric didn’t work so well on the thin wall.

This is an amazing technique that lets you set different slice settings based on the layers of the object. It’s great to see awesome results coming out from different slicing apps and Simplify3D is one we will definitely check out! As Ashley noted in the photo comments, “the craft to 3D printing is in the slicing.” Big kudos to Ashley for making such a lovely looking print! It definitely shows how to make the 3d printing process look seamless to the design. That wooden grain texture also makes a great combo!