Layer by layer

Press Print the sailboat. The printer homes, heats its bed, lays a purge line along the edge and prints the boat one layer at a time. Drag the scene to turn it. Pinch, or scroll once the scene is selected, to zoom, and double tap or press Reset view to go back. With the scene selected, the arrow keys turn it and plus and minus zoom.Pick another print from the shelf, or open Settings to change the layer height, infill, supports and filament colour. Cutaway hides the near half of the print so the infill shows. Print the sailboat with supports off to see what happens to its boom. Finish now skips to the end of a print, and Sound plays the motors and the fan. When a print ends, Remove supports lets its supports drop away and Take it off the bed lifts it to turn on display. Print time is how long the made-up printer would take at 1x, and the shelf remembers in this browser which prints you have finished.

A slicer turns a shape into the moves a printer makes. It cuts the shape into horizontal layers and traces the outline of each layer as walls, two lines thick here. Inside the walls it lays sparse infill, lines at 45 degrees that cross at right angles from one layer to the next, and it closes the top and bottom with solid layers. Where a layer reaches past the one under it by more than a layer height, that plastic would be laid on air, so the slicer builds supports under it to be broken off afterwards. The planter is printed in vase mode: a few solid layers for the base, then one wall that spirals up without a break.The printer is made up for this page. It is a delta: three carriages ride up and down three towers, and each carriage height comes from the same inverse kinematics a real delta printer uses. The four prints are our own designs, written in code as distance fields. Everything runs in your browser, the slicing included, with WebGL we wrote by hand, and nothing you do here is sent anywhere.