Hi hubowners,
I am interested in 3d printing clothing.
I’m looking for soft materials, what feel soft on the skin.
Who have experience with these materials? and which materials are useful?
thank you for your comments!
6 Likes
Thank you Gabriela!
I hope someone can advise me.
Are there more people who have experience with printing dresses?
Hi @mdevisser. We mainly print with Ultimaker’s flexible filament and filaflex from recreus. Ultimakers filament available only in black and white has a leathery feel to it. While filaflex is quite soft and elastic and comes with a wide variety of colors.
Check out makezine’s review of flexible filament which gives you tips on printing flexible materials. Also gives a comparison of strength and stretch.
If you are looking for a printer that prints flexible well. Best look for printers with direct drive extruders( drive motor on the print head) compared to Bowden tube printers (drive extruder not on the head)
The main challenge with flexible is that you have to print very slow. I generally print at a slow 15mm/s. Because of this it’s hard to do complex prints with overhangs and cantilevers. You might want to have a look at lewihe 3dprinter. They apparently can print flexible at an amazing 150mm/s
Hope that helps
@ XYZ Workshop, If I read your post, I make the conclusion that filaflex is the softest material.
Which filament/printer have the smoothest surface?
Filaflex and the Ultimaker filament are the only two I have tried. I cannot comment on the other filaments. the softness and smoothness really depends on how you print.
Softness can be defined by you infill percentage. How solid the print is.
Smoothness depends on the material you print on and the resolution of the print. If you print on a glass bed like the Ultimaker 2 both filaments are super smooth.
really the only way is to try out the filaments and see for yourself. Maybe best is to tell us what you wanna try to achieve and what printer you intend to use. If I don’t know the answer, I’m sure someone else in the community would.
I will try to print clothing. Dresses, shirts, skirts, etc.
Maybe have someone some experience with materials for clothing.
Cinter
8
Hi @mdevisser,
Sounds like a really cool project! Most of the clothing/fashion items that we’ve seen so far are either rigid pieces or interlinking meshes similar to chain mail. They also tend to be very expensive, one-off products for the fashion show catwalks. They generally do not look comfortable. In short, we’re not impressed. Yet.
The suggestions from the other hubs are accurate in that Ninjaflex and other TPE filaments are definitely flexible and elastic. However, I would question whether they would be comfortable. It would likely be a bit like wearing a latex or vinyl suit—not very breathable nor very soft to the skin.
You may be interested in some of the materials in the LAYFOMM line of filaments. My colleagues and I at Cinter have consistently had our minds blown by the work of Kai Parthy ever since we started experimenting with his Laywood and Laybrick filaments about 2 years ago. Many filament producers have since jumped on the bandwagon and started to produce their own composite wood filaments.
Getting back to LAYFOMM, you’ll most likely want to have a look at either the LAY-FELT or the LAY-TEKKKS filaments. I expect that you could produce a dress from multiple panels, much like panel knitting in which pieces are produced individually and then joined together. Please keep in mind that these are experimental filaments. They are more expensive and can be much more sensitive to ambient temperature and humidity. You should probably expect a 30-50% success rate at the beginning, and you may need to make some modifications to your extruder. It’s also safe to assume that you will need to optimise your design for the material itself.
In any event, the materials themselves look super cool! Please keep us updated on where you get with your project.
Here is a link to an article on the LAYFOMM line: http://3dprintingindustry.com/2013/12/24/kai-parthy-gets-felty-foamy-porous-poro-lay-line-filaments/
Interesting @james_hance expect it might be harder to print than flexible filaments since it so porous… Might look out for it to experiment.
are you familiar with our inBloom dress? http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/08/22/blossoming-catwalk-xyz-workshops-3d-printed-inbloom-dress/
you our can download our design for free from #ultimaker #youmagine site. And I can comfortably say it is quite comfortable depending how you design it. I wear a watch version everyday. And it feels abit like leather. We’ve had no complaints about from the models that wear our dresses but then again they don’t wear it for the whole day.
But it I agree that for comfort there needs to be a certain level of porousity to let the human skin breath. That’s why we model our dress with openings to allow that to happen.
we still haven’t figured out how to wash it haha. Cause you can send the dress to the dry cleaner of it will become a pile of goop. Hosing it down in the lawn is probrably the best way, but that ain’t very glamorous is it?
Sorry quite a few typos there… I mean…You can’t send it to the dry cleaners
