I’m trying to create a real world clothing pattern for a 3D printed model and I’m looking at various ways of doing it IRL rather than digitally.
One suggestion is that I model the clothing in 3D and print it as thinly as possible so that it is flexible (within reason, of course) and then reverse engineer it off-line into a pattern.
I can see a lot of problems with this, but I’d like to try it anyway
How would I go about taking a model that has actual thickness in 3D space and just printing the outermost wall of it, and no internal support structure except for actual removable tree support?
Not sure if I understood correctly, but you can set the wall count to 1 in Studio. Do not expect it to be flexible from this alone though. A single wall print using PLA is rather brittle…
You could look at soft TPU, but again, it’ll still be stiffer than cloth an takes a little practice.
Another approach reported in the forum recently linked what may have been a thesis explaining the use of deliberate underextrusion (lowering flow well below calibration results) to achieve increased flexibility.
But considering todays tech, you may want to ask an AI for good guides and forums on clothing pattern creation (from real cloth)? There must be loads of guidance and advice available.
Definitely do it in TPU. One layer of that is very strong and wont disintegrate from a couple flexes. But that strategy will only really work while flat on the plate, for you to mold around later.
To answer specifics about
set walls to 1, tops and bottoms to 1 or 0, infill to 0, and disable lots of stuff in Strength related to infill gaps and shell thickness. It might fail, this is hard for the machine to produce. If it keeps falling over or getting knocked down you might need to strongly reduce accelerations and jerk.
Also, does vase mode solve your problem? It will give the strongest possible 1-wall-and-tall result but is very strict.
The problem with relying only on wall thickness is that you may get flexibility, but you will not really get fabric-like behavior.
Even with TPU, a thin printed sheet is still mostly behaving like a flexible membrane. Fabric behaves the way it does because many small elements can move relative to one another. It can drape, fold, shear, and conform in ways that a simple thin wall generally cannot.
I would look at two different design approaches:
NASA-style printed chainmail / space-fabric geometry
This uses many small interlinked elements printed in place so the part behaves more like a mechanical fabric than a thin flexible sheet.
Slot-pattern / kerf-style flexible prints
Teaching Tech has a good example of using a repeating slot pattern to make otherwise rigid flat prints bend. This is not the same as woven fabric, but it is another useful way to get controlled flexibility from geometry rather than relying only on material softness.
So I would not start by asking, “How thin can I make this wall?” I would start by asking, “What kind of motion am I trying to mimic?” If the goal is fabric-like drape, then print-in-place links, chainmail geometry, or flexible lattice/slot patterns are much better places to experiment.
rather than mimicing motion I’m looking for something that’s easy to slice up with scissors so I can heat it and unfold it into parts like sleave or pant legs in a districtive processe. so like unpicking the stitches on a shirt so that it can be reverse engineered.
It’s easier than trying to measure on a 3d model using a tape.
This will be a districtive processe. it only needs to flex one time. I can heat it to soften it up and cut it into parts with scissors. which i can’t do on a traditional manifold model.
Are you saying that you’re using the slicer as merely a measurement tool and then printing a flexible template that you can scissor-cut around actual cloth?
I’m making a 3d model of what I want to create in cloth. I want to print out just the outermost part of the model with nothing in the middle and then cut then use that print irl to help me make a pattern. which will involve cutting it apart so it will be a once use item. quality and durabity aren’t an issue.
I just do thinks better when I have something irl to model from, my brain struggles to compute lengths and angles on screen especially when getting curves right.
imaging making a cylinder priitive, but not printing the top or bottom, just the outer wall as thinly as I can, the cutting it open and laying it flat so I can trace around it. but with sleaves and pant legs.
What you are describing sounds less like flexible printed fabric and more like a disposable 3D-printed pattern template. You want to print a thin shell of the garment shape, cut it apart, flatten the pieces, and trace them onto fabric.
The part I am not following is the need for a flexible print. Is the flexibility only needed so the thin shell can survive being cut open and flattened one time, or are you trying to form the printed piece around an irregular shape before cutting it?
If the goal is only to create a flat pattern for tracing onto cloth, then the important question may not be fabric-like flexibility. It may simply be whether the printed shell can be thin enough to cut with scissors and tough enough not to crack while you flatten it.
I’m not quite understanding your use case, but in reading all the replies and comments, it sounds like you want to be able to print ONLY the outer layer of your model (the skin I guess), and then cut it up so that you can use those as templates.
Spiral vase mode will automatically print ONLY the outer skin of a 3D model, but no supports are allowed. It automatically sets the wall count to 1, the top layer to 0, and the infill to 0, but you can have multiple bottom layers if you need decent adhesion. As someone already mentioned here, you can also set the wall count to 1, infill to 0, top layers to 0. In this scenario, you issue will be adhesion, because the single wall does not have any area to adhere to the bed.
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