Jeremiah Baker - Finishing Techniques Independent Study

The purpose of this independent study was to research and put into practice finishing techniques for 3D printed parts, resulting in a comprehensive tutorial resource for others to use. I began by researching the numerous techniques out there, and settled on the top 3 to focus on for the purposes of this study. The processes described in this resource were compiled from a number of tutorial videos, which can be found here. These were sanding, XTC3D, and acetone vapor bath. The idea was to determine if there was a clear winner between these 3 based on cost, time required, difficulty, etc. In order to accomplish this, I needed to familiarize myself with each of the processes.

Testing/Gaining experience

I found many great resources and tutorials outlining how to accomplish this process. Of course, I couldn't practice without anything to practice on, so I created a model of a cool prop I found from Star Wars the Clone Wars series. I printed the part out, and began. I decided to sand this piece, as this process has the most nuance and is the hardest to perfect. I'm not going to outline the whole process here, because I've already done that in the resource. Instead, I'll just put some of the photos of the process below.

untouched

initial filler primer

bondo to fill seams

bondo sanded smooth

uniform color applied/final polish

final color applied

outside materials attached

weathering

final assembly

Creating the Resource

To test out the other two processes and create a way to accurately compare the techniques, I 3D printed 5 copies of the same low-poly R2D2 model by Flowalistik and smoothed them in different ways. I left one without any finishing, sanded one, followed a couple tutorials to apply XTC3D to #3, used an acetone vapor bath on #4, and completely smoothed and painted the fifth.