This all started as a joke. One day I was chatting with a coworker who owns a 3D extrusion printer (a Makerbot I think). I mentioned what a bad idea it would be to use a stack of paper and just cut out each layer to make a 3D “print”. We laughed about it, but then I got to thinking.

It would be pretty easy to take in a 3D file into Python and parse it, then produce images for slices out of the model.  PIL is pretty easy to use. And there are many 3D formats (.ply, .stl, .wrl, .dae) that are structured plain text. And I could even simplify by using a program like SketchUp as the designer and good old Windows picture printing functionality to avoid dealing with drivers.

I already had SketchUp installed on my laptop, so I did a little investigation and found it could export to VRML. Initially I wanted to do STL, but I couldn’t be the plugin to load correctly. And since .wrl files are pretty simple text, I decided to start with VRML. I created a few samples and exported them to study the format, and figured out how to choose options to leave out data I didn’t want to deal with.

So I was off into a new project to turn any printer into a 3D printer. I’ll do further posts on my quick-and-dirty approach, simple algorithms, and what I learned along the way.