How I Used 3D Printing to Design My Future Apartment
“Hey, would it be great if you could model and 3D print your apartment to figure out where all the furniture will go?” A colleague’s ironic question turned out to be one of the greatest snipers I have. ever been a victim.
This post originally appeared on the Formlabs Engineering blog .
For the next few weeks, before I moved into my new apartment, I worked nights and weekends putting together an accurate 1:25 scale model of the room. The new apartment was smaller than my previous house and I needed to put my own furniture. Due to the small size of the room and the awkward wall corners in the new location, I struggled to figure out how to arrange everything.
By modeling and 3D printing the apartment and furniture, I determined the layout and furniture to buy before moving in. This is how Tiny Town, as I later christened it, was born.
Modeling space
The first step was to measure everything in the apartment – the size of each room, as well as the location of doors, windows and heating radiators. Using a CAD program, I recreated the floor and wall layouts using 2D sketches. I decided to use OnShape , a free cloud-based CAD software, primarily because I wanted to learn a new program, but any parametric CAD software should help. From these 2D sketches, I then created 1:25 scale drawings that could be exported as DXF files.
From the chipboard, I laser cut the floor and walls, using lower power etching to mark where the walls bend. By making the walls solid, I reduced the amount of gluing that would be required later.
Outside corners are easy to etch with a laser cutter, but inside corners are a little tricky. Since you can only cut one side with the laser, you need to mark the location and then cut the other side with a knife. When choosing interior corners, you also need to consider the thickness of the cardboard. If you don’t have a laser cutter, you can also cut the cardboard by hand using the printouts as stencils. Hot glue works well for assembling walls.
Printing on furniture
While simple boxes would be enough, the extra details really bring Tiny Town to life. After modeling the first few pieces of furniture, I became quite efficient at making handles, handles, shelves and door seams. Since I was printing parts on Form 2 , I knew that it could produce these small parts. The advantage of SLA over FDM is that the printer can handle parts on the order of hundreds of microns, such as cabinet doors and shelves.
First, I went home and measured all the furniture that I was going to bring to my new apartment. Then, using specifications from vendor websites, I found the dimensions for all the furniture I was going to buy.
From these measurements, I created CAD models. I hollowed out each model so that they have a surface 3-5mm thick when scaled down to 1:25 for printing. After exporting as .STL files, I imported the models into PreForm to prepare them for 3D printing.
While some models could be printed flat without support structures, I rotated most models 12º in the X and Y axes and created the support structures with default settings. I packed the work area tightly and used gray resin on all of the furniture for a simple aesthetic.
Arrangement of a tiny town
After I had printed all the furniture, I could start arranging it. Could I do it all exclusively in CAD? Sure, but that would be much less fun.
After trying several different arrangements, I finally settled on a layout in which everything is conveniently located. As a bonus, I used a (paper) printer to print all my paintings and rugs in one 1:25 scale. At the end of the day, I was sure what furniture to order for my new apartment, and I could sleep peacefully knowing that everything would fit.
When Tiny Town was at my workplace in a busy office, I received a lot of feedback from my colleagues. One question repeated from person to person: “Can you go one level deeper?” If I were to take Tiny Town home to my new apartment, it would make sense for me to print Tiny Town for my Tiny Town – a detailed piece measuring only 20mm x 8mm. This type of printing would be one of the rare cases of using a 25 µm high general purpose resin layer, resulting in a 158 mm print. Form 2 worked great and Tiny Tiny Town was successful with most of the feature fixes.
This project most demonstrates how quickly an idea can be brought to life using 3D printing. The speed and ease with which I moved from an idea to a CAD system to a physical model is remarkable. Each print from about a dozen items took 5 minutes to set up, several hours to print, and then half an hour (mostly downtime) to clean. I spent very little time fine-tuning the details, but sanding and painting would add another level of realism to the models. While organizing a simple move into an apartment may not cost the time and pitch, the possibility of creating quality architectural layouts is very real.
I made a tiny town, and so did you: 3D printing my future apartment | Formlabs Engineering