The mold tool gets the solid bauble with its neck as the pour opening. A hanging loop is left off: it would lock the mold.
A round 3D printed Christmas bauble with your name on it: a ball, a drop, an onion or a cone, smooth or with ribs, spiral ribs, facets or a honeycomb, a name (and a second line, such as the year) wrapped round the front, and a motif above it if you like: a moose, a reindeer, a tree, a star, a snowflake, a snowman, a gingerbread man or a paw. On a patterned bauble the name and motif sit on a smooth oval plate that stands just proud of the pattern, the way shop-bought personalised baubles do, so no letter sinks into a groove.
The top is either a neck for a metal ornament cap, like a glass bauble, or a printed hanging loop for a ribbon. The bauble is 50 to 100 mm across (80 mm by default), and the readout tells you its finished size and roughly how much PLA it takes.
Download gives you the bauble split into a front and a back half that each lie flat on their cut face, dome up, with no supports. Filled halves are the easy print: the slicer fills them with infill, and nothing inside overhangs. Hollow halves are lighter and use less filament, but the inside of each dome is an overhang. With a multicolor printer, the 3MF carries the name as its own part in its own color.
| Setting | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Orientation | As downloaded | Each half lies on its flat cut face, dome up |
| Layer height | 0.12 to 0.16 mm | The curve near the top of each dome looks smoother |
| Walls | 3 to 4 perimeters | The shell is all wall |
| Supports | None | Filled halves have no overhang; hollow ones only at the very top of the dome inside |
| Material | PLA, silk PLA | Silk and glitter PLA look like glass ornaments |
What to buy: a pack of metal bauble caps (the neck is 14 mm across by default and can be set from 10 to 20 mm under Advanced settings to match yours), superglue gel, ribbon or ornament hooks, and a silk or glitter PLA if you want it to shine.
Shapes, settings, pins and fixes for a seam or a tight pin, step by step: the 3D printed Christmas bauble guide.
Make a mold from it sends the solid bauble to a mold tool instead: a slip-casting plaster mold for a hollow ceramic bauble, a two-part candle mold for a ball candle, or a silicone mold for resin or concrete. The neck becomes the pour opening; a hanging loop is left off because it would lock the mold.
Anything from 50 to 100 mm across; 80 mm is the default and a usual tree size. The readout under Size and top gives the finished size with the neck or loop, and roughly how many grams of PLA the two halves take.
No. Each half lies on its flat cut face with the dome up. Filled halves have nothing overhanging at all. Hollow halves are lighter, but the inside of each dome is an overhang near the top, so pick Filled if your printer struggles with that.
Cut 5.5 mm pieces of 1.75 mm filament (three for filled halves, four for hollow ones) and push them into the pin holes on one half, so the halves line up exactly. Then glue the rims together with superglue gel and let it set.
The neck is 14 mm across by default, sized for a standard metal ornament cap with a spring wire. If your caps are a different size, change Neck diameter under Advanced settings (10 to 20 mm). Or pick Hanging loop and tie a ribbon through it instead.
Yes. Make a mold from it sends the solid bauble to a mold tool: a plaster mold to slip-cast a hollow ceramic bauble, a two-part mold for a ball candle, or a silicone mold for resin or concrete. The neck becomes the pour opening; a hanging loop is left off because it would lock the mold.