3D Printing

For functional parts, printing a thin test piece first to verify hole positions and thickness before printing the full-size version can avoid wasting time and filament.

Laika Entertainment's industrial methods include using 3D printing technology to make replaceable faces, intricate metal armatures, and large-scale miniature sets.

A single Laika stop-motion film may require tens of thousands of facial models with different expressions, each 3D-printed and then hand-painted.

Starting with Kubo and the Two Strings, Laika introduced color 3D printing technology on a large scale to produce replacement facial parts for characters.

Redesigning the 3D-printed parts can improve the mechanical problems in three ways: wrap-around servo mounts distribute the load, adjusting leg-length ratios and joint angles changes the center-of-gravity distribution, and integrated printing reduces the accumulation of assembly errors.

The core innovation of the Bend chair lies in its hybrid manufacturing process: after 3D printing, specific parts are manually heated and bent, giving the chair organic curves and handmade traces.

Embedding sensing capability directly into 3D-printed structures allows designers to obtain both structural form and interactive functionality in a single print, thereby testing and adjusting interaction schemes faster.

The combination of 3D printing and standard servos is pushing the threshold for multi-DOF robotic hands down to the few-hundred-yuan level.

Compared with 3D printing, laser-cut parts have better in-plane rigidity, uniform thickness, lower per-part cost, and faster processing, making them suitable for frequently iterated linkages and frames.

Printability is always the practical threshold for STL output, and common checks include whether the model is a closed manifold (watertight), whether wall thickness exceeds the lower limits of the printer nozzle diameter and material strength, whether overhang angles require support structures, and whether the overall dimensions are within the print platform range.

3D-printed parts have problems such as interlayer strength, surface roughness and material safety, and when used for pet products, characteristics such as being non-toxic, bite-resistant and not easily broken must be considered.

Trify3D was originally designed for game developers, but its most active user group comes from the 3D printing community, since non-manifold edges cause 3D printing slicing failures or boolean operation crashes.

3D printing has greatly increased the iteration speed of DIY robots; a design may take only a few hours from modeling to a physical object, but the strength and stiffness of printed parts are usually inferior to metal parts, and they are prone to fatigue fracture under high load or high-frequency vibration scenarios.

Virtual reality in the 1990s and 3D printing in the early 2010s both went through cycles of excessive hype and correction.

For DIY robots, appropriately reducing the center distance and improving print precision when purchasing or 3D printing gears is the most direct means of reducing backlash.

The core idea of 3D necroprinting is to use biological materials as the 3D printing nozzle, rather than conventional metal or ceramic print heads.

With the proliferation of open-source hardware, low-cost sensors, and 3D printing technology, individual developers can replicate bipedal locomotion experiments on a budget of a few hundred US dollars that previously required tens of thousands of dollars.

CNC milling is subtractive manufacturing (cutting away excess material from a solid block), while 3D printing is additive manufacturing (depositing material layer by layer).

The kinematic coupling solution has relatively high requirements for the precision and rigidity of 3D-printed parts, and it is recommended to use metal parts or harder engineering plastics (such as nylon or PC) for critical mating surfaces.

4D printing adds a time dimension on top of 3D printing, using smart materials that can autonomously deform in response to stimuli such as temperature, humidity, or light.