Owls and wood

Wood Experimentation

I spent some time working with wood filament when I first started 3d printing, but I haven’t used it since I started making my own dolls. With the potential for a craft fair coming up, I thought I’d revisit it to see if I could perfect my workflow for making simpler, low-cost items.


Painting a piece drives up the price I have to charge, because I need to prime and varnish it too, but wood is brittle and difficult to work with in post-processing, especially when you print multiple at the same time.

Sure enough, these two-part owl figures I made this spring seem perfect, but my first try (front) leaves a lot to be desired. I used a script from the blog tridimake to give the wood texture, but on this scale it loses too much of the detail and creates splinter-like stringing. Wood strengthens the filament along its length, but that just makes the strings harder to cut away.

Two rows of 3d printed owls on a cluttered, green work mat. There are five in the front row that are noticably rougher, with pronounced horizontal lines and splinter-like imperfections. The four in the back are larger and almost completely smooth.

I tried again, 125% bigger (back), but the texture script failed to run. I’m happy with the size though, it seems to strike a good balance between filament efficiency and ease of assembly. The square-cube law is a fickle mistress with chunky prints like this.

The heads and bodies of 5 3d printed owls on a 3d printer printbed. There's a web of loose 'strings' of filament between the volumes. A close up of the body of one of the owls, with strings and spirals of filament that look like splinters in snapped wood.

Here's the successfully textured set on the printbed. I wonder if the script makes the stringing worse? Each of these threads are about as strong as a real wood splinter, though fortunately not as sharp.

Two rows of the three sets of owls, lying on their backs. The furthest left set have rings of texture, like wood grain, the same as the small ones on the right. They also have more imperfections than the smooth ones in the middle.

And here's them assembled. They have the same texture settings as the small ones, and even at this size it might be a bit strong. I think I'll wait a week and see what I feel then.