TEXTURED SURFACES
With only one physical step from a digital CAD file to a printed part, Luximprint technology offers an excellent way to manage excessive and risky tooling investments, cutting away major uncertainties about the outcomes of final production tooling. New product launches can now easily be prepared, physical sampling presented and approved even before the final fabrication tooling is ordered.
3D Printing Textured Surfaces
Apart from use in functional prototyping applications, designers and engineers, along with mold and toolmakers – use Luximprint technology for inspirational prototyping and validation of textured or patterned surface tooling. Usually, the high complexity of the textured surfaces would require extremely intensive labour. Especially when using traditional fabrication methodologies, such as diamond turning or machining, creating embossing tools for end part fabrication is a time consuming job. Resulting from this, significant engineering time and investment losses are a bad day-to-day reality.
Complexity is Free
Textured surfaces as printed by Luximprint technology, come along with great clarity and detail. No matter it concerns sharp or accurate features, an extreme smooth surface finish, or a frosted gradient, the 3D printing process of Luximprint can realize it.
Where conventional fabrication technologies lack, Luximprint offers now a great physical tool that can be used in the early stages of product develpment to ensure a smooth way to the market.
Large Surfaces – Finest Details – Multi-Materials
The maximum area of the build tray gets close to one SQM. As a base material, a great variety of technical optical plastics can be used, ranging from flexible sheet materials or even thin films to stiff and stable sheets of acryllic. If no translucency is required, a broad range of other materials may fit the bill.
When moving away from optically clear, translucent materials, multi-color gradients or colored textures come to play. To discover the opportunities in that particular space, please refer to our Optographix product section.
Post Threatments of Textured Surfaces
In fact, no additional post-threatments are required, such as polishing, blasting or grinding the parts. When leaving the 3D printer, the parts are optically smooth and no additional handling is required.
However, for certain applications, the application of industrial coatings might be required. Alu-reflective or UV-coatings can be applied onto the surfaces in order to fullfill specific project needs.
WHY 3D PRINTING TEXTURED SURFACES?
Printed Surface Textures help you to:
- Speed up Development Processes: Prepare fast, efficient and impressive product presentations with real mock-ups in a matter of days, rather than weeks or months;
- Iterative Design Processing: Show a variety of product variations and/or iterations in an extremely short timeframe, and finally pick the most appreciated version to proceed with;
- Create an Impact: Convince your internal product / marketing team about the next product launch, or surprise and impress your contractor with his next collection items;
- Manage tooling investment risk: Manage the risk of mis-investments in costly production tooling or even exclude it by forecasting the expected outcome with real mock-ups;
Color Harmony and Virtual Depth
Luximprint technology turns complicated digital designs into stunning, real life 3D surfaces. Large three-dimensional surfaces can be fabricated without the need for physical production tooling, thus adding a next dimension to the design landscape and providing a new tool for product developers, designers and engineers.
“Luximprint technology helped us to quickly ‘trial-and-error’ different patterned glass imitations, enabling us to perfectionize the product before our first product meeting. We finally got a VERY representative (plastic) masterpiece that we could show both to our internal marketing department as well as our end customer for concept validation!”
“Our digital designs were fast and cost-efficiently turned into a functional validation sample by Luximprint. It allowed us to manage the expectations of our customer and supported him on validating the concept even before ordering the final production tooling”
“Thanks to Luximprint Technology, we were able to present last-minute a representative range of new product collection samples at our bi-annual show. In just a short few weeks, we created different product samples in a fast and cost-effective manner”
Prototypes with complicated textures can be used for different purposes, ranging from tooling validation to marketing sampling and functional testing.
Printed textures not only simplify and speed-up the tooling decision making process, the translucent parts also come with great functionality. As such, functional design and aesthetic value go hand in hand!