Setting the Print Orientation and using Batch Control

Part orientation matters for the aspect of your 3D printed object

Our finishes, our 60μ printing resolution option for white polyamide, and cutting-edge technologies like Carbon CLIP allow us to reduce the visibility of the 3D printing layers. But 3D printing remains an additive manufacturing technique, and the layers will be visible with a very meticulous examination. Choosing your 3D printing orientation means choosing where and how the layers will be most visible and the orientation of those layers.

This image shows the difference between the raw and polished finish. Even though the layers are less visible on the polished object, they still can be seen and felt. Changing the orientation of your part will change the orientation of these visible layers.

The layers are even less visible with our chemical smoothing finish (on the left)

In batch control, part orientation can reduce your 3D printing price. Another use of customizing your part orientation is the price of your batch order. The height of your 3D print has an impact on its price. When you 3D print several iterations of the same objects together, the way you orientate them makes the batch more or less high and might decrease the 3D printing price.  

As always, with our interface, your 3D printing price will be calculated automatically as soon as you make a change.

How do you customize your orientation?

Once you’ve uploaded your file onto our platform and chosen all of your options (material, color, layer thickness, finish, scale, and quantity), click on the “Optimize” tab (the one in the middle).

Then, turn on the “Customize orientation” button.

Your 3D viewer will then be complemented with specific buttons to change the orientation of your object on the left and at the bottom. You can click on them, and you’ll see the object move in the 3D viewer, like this:

The advantage of a 3D printing service: choose your orientation, we take care of everything

This adds just one more advantage to using a 3D printing service: you can experiment with the effect of orientation on your part and still guarantee that your part will be just as well 3D printed for the same price (or lower).

This feature is open to expert users and batch orders because it takes some experience of 3D printing before being sensible to part orientation and its effect on the visibility of your object’s layers.

What’s batch control

We created the batch control option to acknowledge that 3D printing is now a real alternative to traditional manufacturing techniques like plastic injection. It allows to reduce the price (by up to 80%) and to increase control for any order of more than 20 copies of the same 3D model.

The Sculpteo batch control option is designed to realize that 3D printing is now a real alternative to traditional production techniques such as plastic injection. 

Through the batch control option, we offer a virtual control of our professional 3D printers. When you want to print at least 20 units of the same 3D file in Plastic, the batch control options provide:

• An adapted price of production for small and medium series (from 20 to thousands of units).
• Control over the 3D print resolution with two possible values: 60μ or 100μ