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Adding Texture to 3D Prints [Hackaday]
[3DJake] likes putting textures on 3D prints using things like patterned build plates and fuzzy skin. However, both of those techniques have limitations. The build plate only lets you texture the bottom, and the fuzzy skin texture isn’t easy to control. So he shows how to use Blender to create specific textures to produce things like wood-like or leather-like surfaces, for example. You can see how it works in the video below.
As [Jake] points out, you might be able to use other artistic programs to do this, but the kind of things we use like FreeCAD of Fusion360 aren’t going to cut it.
He uses a bag with a leather texture as an example. The resulting model is too detailed and contains around 1.4 million triangles. Your printer isn’t that detailed, and your slicer will probably choke on a model with that many triangles. Decimating the model makes it more manageable.
The resulting bags, when printed using TPU and painted, hardly look like 3D prints. Well, other than the strap, perhaps. The textures were just pulled from the Internet, so there are, potentially, many to choose from as long as they are seamless.
One interesting build plate texture is a diffraction grating. You can also add special textures manually. Textures are good at hiding layer lines, even just the fuzzy skin textures you find in many slicers.