Do you need to incorporate text onto your 3D printed parts?
Whether you're printing a serial number for part identification,
incorporating tool instructions,
adding your company logo, or even just one inscribed something fun.
The print quality and legibility matter.
Today, I'm going to show you my best practices for designing text onto 3D printed parts.
We’re going to take a deep dive into Fusion 360
and go through my design intent step by step and ultimately arrive
at an optimized 3D printed part with text features.
Before I get started, this part that I'm showing you,
it was printed on Markforged Metal X in 17-4 Stainless Steel.
But the same design principles should transfer over
to most other FFF 3D printers and the materials that you're using.
I'm Ross and this is Reinforced.
Now we’re in Fusion 360.
What we're looking at here
is an end of arm tool and gripper, and the bulk of the design is complete.
The last thing that we need to do is to add our text that will include
our tool number, revision, and material that this part includes.
We want to incorporate this into the print and tattoo
it so it's permanently addressed into the part itself.
Being the last step in the design process,
we need to pick where on this part we add the tool number.
We have three main locations.
The first one is on the top of the part here.
The second one is on the bottom
and then the third is on this wall.
All three of these locations will not interfere
with the actual functionality of this tool itself.
So how do we think about which position is best for this text?
Well, the first option is going to be this layer right here,
and this is going to be our build surface that we have designed
the part for early on.
Since this is our first layer, it's usually not a position that you want
to put the text because the first layer is the most critical layer
that determines the success of the subsequent layers later on.
If we can avoid introducing more complexity into this layer,
our print is going to become more reliable.
Now we have two remaining options for the location of our text.
On the top of the part or on the sides of it.
And both of these are more than suitable,
but one is going to be better than the other.
And let me explain why.
Now, a useful analogy
for the anatomy of a 3D printed part might be a sticky note.
Each individual layer is represented by a single sheet of paper,
and each sheet of paper has a specific profile,
which in this case is just a simple square.
We put all those pieces together you get a block.
Now, if we were to put our text on the top piece of this paper,
the nozzle is going to have to draw that shape, just like you would do with a pen.
If I want to draw a bunch of letters into very different shapes,
I'm going to be limited by my penmanship, which is never really been my thing.
And the smaller we get
and the more detailed we get, the less legible it will become.
But we instead put the text on the side of the part
and only make these small cuts into each profile of that individual
layer, we'll get much finer resolution on the part and be able to go much further
with the shapes and the sizes that we incorporate the text.
So we're not trying to squeeze things into our design as well as get
letters and words that are illegible to our machine operators.
So when we take this back into the part
since we have design freedom to choose there or here whenever
possible, it's better to design your text on the sides of the part
than the roofs of your part.
So now that we've picked the location for our text,
next thing we're going to do is create a sketch on that plane.
We're going to use our text tool
and add the specific metadata as relevant for this tool.
We've got to refine the size,
space it out,
we’ll go down to a certain size where it all fits
into one sheet.
So we picked a height of three
and we're going to have some constraints here.
The most specific one is going to be how wide of a letter
we have in the distance between each shape.
So we put it on the sides of the wall
and we added our text, and now we want to make it
as big as possible so it’s the most legible
But we also want to make it small enough that it fits into this area
and the smallest that we can go when we put the text on the walls
is a width of 0.4 from one point to the next.
If we were to put it on the roof of the part.
The smallest that we can go is 0.6mm.
So putting it on the walls gives us more freedom to fit into smaller spaces.
Now let's move on to fonts.
Deciding font can be a personal preference, but I tend to go with Rubik.
It's common and it's pretty uniform all the way around.
Helvetica, Arial, Verdana.
These are great choices as well.
When you think about what font you want to use,
try to make sure that's uniform in dimension.
Otherwise, you may get some inconsistencies in the printed result,
and that's why I recommend Sans Serif over Serif fonts.
So for those of you that may not know,
Serif fonts have small lines attached to the ends of the letters
and may have different size weights per line, while Sans Serif fonts have none.
Now, as I said, my personal preference is Rubik
so I’ll select that and add it to our part.
So now that we got the text designed, we now need to turn this into a three dimensional feature.
We can either extrude it out of the part or we can cut it into the part.
Emboss vs deboss.
Now, both of these are viable methods,
but the one thing that you want to consider
is if you do extrude it out of your part,
you need to ensure it's not going to interfere
with any of the functionality of the application.
I typically extrude boss, it just prints better
because it will require less supports when it’s designed to the correct depth of the part.
Now, if we come to our part, we're going to select our text.
And now the last design decision that we need to make,
how far do we extrude it out?
What I typically use is 0.25 millimeters.
This is a very fine detail, but reduces
the amount of overhang that the part has and will eliminate any need for supports.
And this applies for both extruding and cutting into the part.
You may go thicker when you cut into the part
if you want to have better legibility and give some contrasting colors
into the text itself.
So we’ll command fusion to do 0.25
and that will generate this 3D printed boss.
And now we have our three dimensional shape tattooed on to the part,
and this will permanently allow us to know exactly what part it is.
When it was made and what it was made out of.
Now, if your design calls for this part to be extruded into the part itself,
the only change that we have to make here is change our distance from positive .25
to negative .25 and change the command or the operation to cut.
And now we have the three dimensional text extruded into the part.
And that's it.
We have our part designed and optimized to include our text.
We're now ready to print.
So why don’t we recap what we just learned.
Be aware of how you plan to orient your part while printing.
This will help dictate the placement of your text and help
you decide where the optimal location is to place this.
Now, my recommendation is to print your text on the walls of your part.
This is going to give you the most amount of freedom
and make it the most legible text.
You can either emboss it or deboss this text.
You're going to want to use a uniform font,
preferably something that's a sans serif and your font width should be around
0.8 millimeters thick, but no smaller than 0.4 millimeters.
And now the depth that you extrude or cut it into should be about 0.25 millimeters.
Now, you may go a little bit thicker when you're in embossing your text,
but be aware of how these supports get generated at those thicknesses.
If you follow these rules, your design is going to be looking sharp
and it's going to have minimal post-processing after it's done printed.
Now, for those of you that have design constraints
and are absolutely required to put the text on the roof of your part,
I'd first recommend in embossing this text.
My font recommendations still apply.
However, the width of this font should be increased to around
one millimeter to give it a thicker profile, make it easier to print.
So when you're on the roof, the depth should be about 2 to 4 layers thick.
Depends on your layer thickness.
And lastly, if you're printing logos or other types of design
features, all these tips should apply seamlessly.
Get creative with it.
I really hope that you found this video helpful, but do you still have a question?
Reach out in the comments.
I'd love to get back to you on it.
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Thanks a lot for watching.