Model Making
3D printing brings ideas to life with high precision and detail, making it ideal for model making across the automotive industry, architecture, product design, and engineering. Complex shapes, fine features, and custom designs can be produced quickly and accurately, supporting both visual presentation and functional prototyping.
Advantages
Smarter parts, fewer limits.
Models can be produced directly from CAD in hours rather than days or weeks, without building molds or special tooling. This makes it easy to iterate concepts, update designs late, and react quickly to feedback for architectural, product, or engineering models.
3D printing captures fine features, curved surfaces, and intricate structures that are time‑consuming or impossible to build by hand. That’s ideal for architectural models, product design mockups, and technical demonstrators where realistic proportions, internal details, or complex staircases and facades matter.
Once a digital model exists, scaled versions, variants, and customized configurations can be produced easily without major extra effort. This supports client-specific architectural models, different layout options, and personalized presentation pieces while keeping costs under control.
Possibilities
3D printing enables detailed architectural and industrial models that accurately represent buildings, plants, and machines at scale. You can produce complex facades, staircases, pipe runs, and equipment layouts directly from CAD, helping stakeholders visualize projects, discuss design options, and spot collisions or access issues early.
Designers use 3D printed models to explore form, ergonomics, and function before committing to tooling. Typical examples include handheld device mockups, enclosure studies with snap-fits and buttons, or exploded display models that reveal internal components, making it easier to align engineering, marketing, and customer expectations.
In medical and dental fields, 3D printed models turn scan data into tangible anatomy for planning, education, and communication. Concrete use cases include printed jaws for implant planning, heart or vascular models for surgical rehearsal, and patient-specific skull or bone models that help explain procedures to patients and train clinical teams.
Materials
Somos® WaterShed XC 11122 is a clear, water‑resistant stereolithography resin with ABS‑ and PBT‑like performance characteristics, offering a tensile strength of 50.4 MPa, a flexural modulus of 2,205 MPa, and 15.5% elongation at break. Its high clarity and water resistance make it ideal for detailed parts and fluid‑flow‑monitoring applications.
Combining Somos® WaterShed XC 11122 with the Stratasys® Neo800+ produces transparent parts with exceptional clarity, water resistance, and impact strength – ideal for fluid flow visualization, lighting mockups, and many more. The Neo800+'s 4W 355 nm laser enables builds up to 50% faster than its predecessor, while its large-format SLA platform ensures high precision (±0.004 in. for dimensions under 3.94 in.) and smooth, injection molding-quality surface finishes for demanding 24/7 production workflows.
Materials
Somos® GP Plus 14122 is an opaque white, high-durability resin developed for SLA 3D printing. It replicates the performance of common production plastics such as ABS and PBT, delivering strong dimensional accuracy, solid stiffness, and a smooth surface finish. Thanks to its low viscosity and rapid processing, it is well suited for a wide range of general-purpose uses, including functional components and premium visual prototypes. The resin offers excellent humidity resistance, dimensional stability, and mechanical strength, with a tensile modulus of 2,510 MPa and flexural strength of 67.3 MPa.
The Stratasys® Neo800+ is an advanced large-format stereolithography (SLA) 3D printer optimized for high-throughput production of accurate, detailed parts up to 50% faster than its predecessor, using ScanControl+ technology. It supports open 355 nm resins like Somos® GP Plus 14122, enabling seamless integration for industrial prototyping and low-volume manufacturing.
Materials
Somos® WaterShed® Black is a stereolithography material from Stratasys® that is perfect for model making applications. Built on Somos® WaterShed® XC 11122 technology, it features a tensile strength of 50.4 MPa, flexural strength of 68.7 MPa, and a viscosity of ~260 cps at 30°C. It offers dimensional stability, fine detail resolution, smooth surface finish, and excellent moisture and chemical resistance – ideal for accurate models.
On the Stratasys® Neo®800 with its 800 x 800 x 600 mm build platform, its true black color straight off the machine, minimal finishing, and consistent processing eliminate post-processing steps like painting – saving both time and cost.
Materials
PTG PA12 is a high-performance polyamide 12 powder from ProductionToGo, specifically developed for powder-based 3D printing processes such as HSS, PBF, SLS, and MJF, suitable for functional prototypes, series components, and technical end-use applications. As a nylon 12 material, it offers a combination of high mechanical strength, impact resistance, and dimensional stability alongside low moisture absorption, ensuring that parts remain dimensionally stable and accurate even in humid or changing environments. The material is chemically resistant to many polar and non-polar solvents, oils, and greases.
A wide range of printers — including the Nexa3D® QLS 230, QLS 236, QLS 260, and QLS 820, the Stratasys® H350, and the Raise3D RMS220 — can process this material precisely and without the use of support structures, enabling the design of complex geometries.
Materials
Printable with
INFINAM® RG 3101 L is an excellent choice for model making in 3D printing. With a tensile modulus of 2,100 ± 200 MPa and a flexural modulus of 2,100 ± 40 MPa, it delivers the rigidity needed for precise, dimensionally stable models. An elongation at break of 30 ± 10% adds just enough toughness to withstand handling without compromising structural integrity – making it a reliable material for detailed and accurate model production.
The XiP Pro from Nexa3D, with its patented LSPc® 7K technology and a build volume of 292 × 163 × 410 mm, is an outstanding match for INFINAM® RG 3101 L in model making. Its high-resolution LCD engine translates the material's stiffness — tensile and flexural modulus of 2,100 MPa — into dimensionally accurate, finely detailed models with smooth, consistent surfaces.
Materials
Printable with
INFINAM® TI 5400 L stands out for model making in 3D printing thanks to its exceptional balance of flexibility and strength. With a tensile modulus of 1,500 ± 200 MPa and a flexural modulus of 1,100 ± 200 MPa, it provides solid structural integrity for detailed models. What truly sets it apart is its elongation at break of 210 ± 20% — delivering outstanding flexibility and impact resistance, making printed models highly durable and resistant to breakage even under stress.
INFINAM® TI 5400 L and the XiP Pro from Nexa3D make a compelling duo for producing parts that need to be both precise and resilient. The printer's LSPc® 7K technology and 292 × 163 × 410 mm build volume ensure every detail is rendered accurately, while the material's tensile modulus of 1,500 ± 200 MPa and flexural modulus of 1,100 ± 200 MPa provide reliable structural performance. With an elongation at break of 210 ± 20%, the printed parts handle stress and bending with ease — a combination that opens the door to functional prototypes and end-use components that perform as good as they look.
Materials
Printable with
PolyJet™ materials are UV-curable photopolymers for high-resolution additive manufacturing, offering a wide range of mechanical properties across rigid, flexible, transparent, and digital material formulations. Tensile strength spans from low single-digit MPa for rubber-like grades to roughly 70–80 MPa for high-temperature rigid materials, with elongation at break from ~10–25% for rigid resins to over 300% for elastomers. Shore hardness ranges from ~45–50A to ~85–88D. These materials are best suited for model making, concept prototypes, ergonomic samples, and functional mock-ups where geometry and appearance take priority over structural or high-temperature performance.
The J-Series family is built around Stratasys®'s PolyJet™ process. The print heads jet photopolymer droplets at resolutions down to 14 microns in the Z-axis, curing each layer with UV light immediately after deposition. This yields smooth, injection-molded-like surface finishes straight off the build platform. What sets the J-Series apart is its multi-material print head array, jetting several resins simultaneously within the same layer — producing parts that transition from rigid to rubber-like, or carry photorealistic full color with PANTONE®-validated accuracy, all in a single uninterrupted print run without assembly or secondary processing.
Use Cases
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