The Low-Res Revelation: Printing a Perfect Reef

Sometimes the best ideas emerge from the greatest challenges.

For Production, default factory settings is “finish to the highest specification”. So it was an unusual learning curve to identify on one occasion, that setting output quality to the LOWEST, gave the most accurate and realistic results for our client.

To produce an enormous, hyper-real coral reef for Sky Ocean Rescue, our preliminary tests calculated 40,320 hours necessary to 3D print at high resolution the 25m2 of base structures and 1500 models of coral species. With production already spread over several of our 3D printing teams, and 40 machines running 24/7 for 8 weeks, we still exceeded the lead time available.

So we took a fresh look at the brief.

We recognised the organic, imperfect and random ‘layered’ growth patterns, and porous surface texture of coral leant itself to printing at extremely low resolution. This increased the porosity of the surface finish, created wonderful imperfections and irregularities, and deliberately accentuated the layer delineation one so often aims to conceal in 3D printing. Fundamentally, it reduced printing time by 50% whilst adding a huge level of realism we would have otherwise missed at high resolution.

This reminded us to always stop and take a fresh look at the brief, just to check you haven’t inadvertently fallen down a rabbit hole, chasing the highest production standards.