How to Scale Your Architectural 3D Print
As big as possible.
But how big is possible? And why is big better? Is bigger better? The reasoning behind thinking big is better is that it is:
a. More impressive, &
b. Easier to see.
In other words, it’s more communicative. Ultimately, an architectural 3D print is a tool for communicating the design from the idea developed by the architect to the client. It’s your client that is key to understanding how to scale your print. If you know the reason why you’re 3D printing and exactly who’s receiving the 3D print, it’s just a process of translating those intents into every part of the 3D printing process, including the scale.
Here at BVN, we do a decent amount of projects in the City of Sydney region. If you’re delivering your print for legal reasons to a governing body like we often do, it’s likely that they’ll have a specific scale in place that you’ll have to adhere to. For example, if you’re going to provide a building for the City of Sydney’s scale model, you’ll need:
- A scale of 1:500
- 100 metres of site context if there are 10 or below stories
- 200 metres of site context if there are more than 10 stories
For a client, there’s usually a bit more freedom in what scale you can choose.
The first thing that you’ll want to consider is how much time you have. It takes more time to print larger, finer models as opposed to smaller, coarser models, which could be done in a few hours if need be. Most 3D printing software applications will tell you the estimated amount of time it will take to print what you want to print — use it, and most of all take it into account. Unless you have an extremely limited time-frame, it’s always ideal to leave at least a few extra hours of leeway time to allow for print failures and incorrect ETAs.
The next thing to consider is how detailed the model is. As the detail increases, so should the size of the model. The model should accurately represent all the details of the print without looking too chunky, which can happen with large, under-detailed models. For example, in the print below of UNSW’s Kensington Campus, buildings are mostly large rectangular blocks without many details — making these larger than they are now wouldn’t communicate any extra detail and would look too chunky. However, at the same time if the print was scaled down further it might become difficult to tell the difference between a rough surface and some of the smaller buildings in the surrounding areas.
The next thing that needs consideration is the smoothness & accuracy of the finish. When using your 3D printing software, you can choose the print’s layer height — basically its resolution. As the layer height decreases, the less you can tell it was made by piling layers on top of each other, and the longer it takes to print. Having a smaller layer height can help to communicate fine details, and looks more professional. For example, as you can see in the prints below, as the layer height goes from large to fine the quality of the finish increases, meaning that your print can tell your client more about your design and less about your 3D printing skills.
Another important factor that you have to take into account is the size of your 3D printer. Sadly, 3D printers don’t have infinite range, so even though you can cut your print up and print it, the pieces at least are going to have to stay inside the boundaries. If you know the size of your printer, and the size of your 3D print, you can use this mini calculator to see if your print will fit, and whether it’s going to be fairly tight:¹
With all of these things in mind, it’s also a good idea to aim for a common architectural scale. This can help people who are familiar with scales know what size they are dealing with; it’s also easier to say that your building is at 1:100 than at 1:103.4 for example. If it’s fairly close, and you’re sure that it will still fit in your printer, changing to one of these scales makes it easier to communicate your design to people. Be wary however with making your design slightly larger to fit one of these scales — it fitting inside the printer is more important!
Having dealt with deciding on a scale, the next post in this series covering 3D printing will delve into a problem we’ve recently run into, splitting your print. We’ll talk about when you should, and how you should approach it if you decide to.
- A big thank you to Aiden Ray, Ben Doherty, Ishaan Varshney, and Tristan Anlezark for helping figure out the maths behind this tool. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than we originally thought, here’s the math stack exchange post on the issue that we used in the end. ↩
