Things I Found Interesting in October 2026

Prototype zero was an acrylic container I had laying around for some reason, then took that shape and added some structure inside of it with freecad, then re-arranged the dimensions some more and added some walls to hold things better. I ran out of white filament so the third prototype is sporting a clear filament. STL for the current version of the pencil holder.

Instead of 3d printing a model completely smooth, come back and add patterned textures to the surface. I was exploring creating a model in freecad, and then exporting it to blender to add a displacement map, then exporting something I could 3d print.

The general process is:

• export obj from freecad
• import obj from blender
• select the faces you want to have the texture and add them to a vertex group
• subdivide that surface a few times if it doesn't have a lot of geometry
• u smart uv unwrap the object
• add subdivision surface modifier
• add displace modifier with a new texture, select uv for coordinates, and the vertex group you created
• adjust the strength

Links

• brick texture texture : lots of free textures
• 3dprint Toolbox in Blender extension for blender, to find out why your model is invalid.
• Apply any texture to printable model video
• idea to do this from here