

Most of the current demand for 3D printing is industrial in nature. Where 3D printing was only suitable for prototyping and one-off manufacturing in the early stages, it is now rapidly transforming into a production technology. 3D Printing IndustryĪdoption of 3D printing has reached critical mass as those who have yet to integrate additive manufacturing somewhere in their supply chain are now part of an ever-shrinking minority. Your sliced file is now ready to be 3D printed layer by layer. Feeding the file to your printer can be done via USB, SD or Wi-Fi. When your file is sliced, it’s ready for your 3D printer. Slicing basically means slicing up a 3D model into hundreds or thousands of layers and is done with slicing software. Slicing: From printable file to 3D Printer Now that you have a printable file, the next step is to prepare it for your 3D printer. Tinkercad offers beginner lessons and has a built-in feature to export your model as a printable file e.g. Tinkercad is free and works in your browser, you don’t have to install it on your computer. We often recommend beginners to start with Tinkercad. We’ve created an overview on our 3D software page. There are many different software tools available. You can opt to create one from the ground up or download it from a 3D library. These websites offer a one-stop solution and take away the hassle of individually searching for the model on different websites.It all starts with a 3D model. Last, we have included search engines that let you search for a specific model across many sites at once.

Usually, these websites are great places to get premium models and you can even directly request the creator to create a specific model for your needs. You get access to premium models that you can purchase for a particular fee.

Marketplaces are websites that let you buy and sell STL files or 3D models. Most of the websites mentioned in this list are repositories. Depending upon the particular website, you might need to create an account to download these files. These files are free to download for anyone. We’ve sorted out all the websites in three different categories: Repositories, Marketplaces, and Search Engines.Ī repository is a place where you can get a large collection of free STL files.

To get the full benefit of this list, it helps to understand the differences between the various websites.
