Show HN: I built a word art generator for 3D printers

2•ductionist•2h ago

I built a free browser-based tool for generating 3D text with multi-colour outlines, designed for 3D printers that support multiple filaments.

You type text, pick a font, add coloured outline layers, adjust thickness, and preview everything in real-time 3D. Then export as 3MF and each colour shows up as a separate named part that drops straight into Bambu Studio, no need for manual painting. You can also download the STLs.

Tech details for the curious:

- Vanilla JS client code - Three.js for 3D preview, opentype.js for font parsing - Geometry pipeline: opentype paths → Clipper-lib (boolean ops for outline rings via cumulative offsets + differences) → Tess2 (triangulation) → extruded meshes - Server-side export via Cloudflare workers (same geometry pipeline, runs headlessly to produce 3MF/STL) - Preview images generated by @cf-wasm/resvg on the edge - Every design is a shareable URL, all state lives in query params - Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Would love feedback especially from folks doing multi-colour printing.

Comments

Piyush_Dinde•2h ago

Pretty cool. My niece actually loved it! I do not have much exposure with the designing tools. But always found them fascinating to use. The name wordcad took me back to my engineering college days when I used to use AutoCAD heavily. I was terrible at it.

ductionist•2h ago

Thanks! My daughter loved it too. I tried to design the sharing workflow so that kids could send their designs to friends with printers (that's why I stuffed all the state into the query string). I struggled with the name, WordCAD sounds so stodgy to me, but the kids I talked to thought it was cool and serious haha

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