• Realistic 3D printed wood

    02/07/2022 at 09:41 1 comment

    In this article, I show several techniques that allow you to transform standard woodfill into prints virtually indistinguishable from real wood!

    Prerequisites

    1. Any woodfill filament. In my case I'm using Sakata.wood maple 1.75
    2. A 3D printer 
    3. Lots of viscous superglue
    4. Wood stain
    5. Sponge and papertowels
    6. A couple of pairs of plastic (HDPE) gloves
    7. Sandpaper (200, 400 and 800 grit)
    8. Super glue accelerator spray (optional)
    9. Polishing paste (optional)

    Overview of the process

    The process consists of the following steps and can be time consuming especially for complex objects:

    1. Applying wood texture to the 3D printed object
    2. Printing
    3. Sanding the print to enhance wood stain absorbtion
    4. Staining
    5. Sanding to enhance contrast of wood grain
    6. Filling the gaps with superglue and curing it
    7. Levelling and polishing

    Applying wood texture to the 3D printed object

    This is the first and perhaps the most important step that will determine the final outcome. The idea here is to create wood pattern over the printed object - the concave parts of the print will be filled with wood stain and the coplanar or convex parts will be sanded after staining and therefore significantly brighter, creating a nicely contrasting and convincing wood grain.

    There are at least two options for this process.

    The first option is to use ZBrush, Blender or any other capable software to apply a texture into the object geometry and create the aforementioned grain. This is quite a lengthy subject and it's out of scope of this tutorial, but the advantage is that patterns of arbitrary shape and complexity can be obtained with this method

    The second option is to use a post processing script that varies the nozzle temperature from layer to layer, creating realistic wood pattern. The script can be downloaded here: 

    https://github.com/MoonCactus/gcode_postprocessors/tree/master/wood

    It used to be available as a Cura plugin, but since Cura had a very inconsistent support for their plugins, it was modified to also work as a standalone script. The page explains in detail how to use the script. I recommend that you use Python 2.7 for this, since newer versions can cause issues.

    Now slice your print with your favorite program (I use Cura) and run the script on the GCODE file you got from your slicer according to the instructions on the script homepage linked above. It will modify it by adding temperature variations. 

     If the script fails to process your print (if you open the GCODE file with a text editor and don't see an ASCII art wood graph at the end of the GCODE file), you will have to modify line 363 from

    elif not "m104" in line.lower():  # forget any previous temp in the file

    to 

    if not "m104" in line.lower():  # forget any previous temp in the file
    

    Other than varying the temperature of the filament which affects the color, this will also cause the filament to shrink or swell depending on the temperature - this will create grooves which we will be able to fill with wood stain in the next steps.

    Printing

    Once you print your object, it should look somewhat like this:

    You can see there are visible grooves which are also darker. If you decided to use Blender or ZBrush to create the wood texture, the color will be more uniform, but what matters is that the surface has these grooves we will color darker with the wood stain and sanding.

    Sanding

    In this step, you will just hand sand the print with 200 grit sand paper - this will increase the absorption of the wood stain - try to get the sandpaper into the grooves too - it will help obtain a more contrasty look. When you sand wood and wood-like materials, always sand along the grain - this helps retain the direction of the grains and prevents scratches.

    There's nothing to show in a picture as the sanded part looks nearly the same as before, only the surface is more porous, which will help the wood stain to penetrate deeper into the print.

    Staining

    This is the tricky...

    Read more »