3d printing – resize an object with different factor on axes

openscadTo tell you the full story, I was working on a 3d object I want to reproduce. The initial model is a 10cm object. I’ve got a 3D scan of this object and now I want to make a mold to reproduce it with a smaller size (3cm). All should be simple as even my printer software have a resize option.

The problem started when once resized the height of the object has became too small and the precision of the printer does not allow to have a good result. For my need it was not really important to preserve proportion on the Z axis. So I was looking for a tool able to resize an object with a different setting factor for each of the axis.

This tool exists and more over it is really useful for any STL manipulation (at least you need to be a coder) : its name is OpenSCAD. This tool is a programming language for 3D object allowing different object transformation and creation.

For my need to scale X & Y with a 0.4 factor and Z with a 0.6 factor, the following code was the solution :

scale([0.4, 0.4, 0.6]) import("Moule.stl", convexity=3);

You then just have to export as STL by clicking on STL icon and you have the result. Sounds nice, isn’t it ?!?