Acrylic Plastic

Hi,

I want to get print house models for my architecture friend, but he told me that i will need Acrylic Plastic for architecture models. What does he mean? Is lulzbot taz 6 capable of printing with Acrylic Plastic? Or anyone here print anything for architecture firm before and what material did you use?

Well, no, a Taz or any other 3d printer in that price range for that matter isn’t going to be able to print Acrylic. Acrylic is a castable resin, not generally a printable plastic. That being said, your friend is 100% mistaken about needing to use Acrylic to make a house model. People can and do use PLA, ABS, NGEN or even nylon or polycarbonate to make architectural models, and it really depends on what you want to present. I’ve used ABS for example to make models of bridges and interchanges for a certain highway department. Those work well as solid models. You can do the same thing with exterior solid building models. I’ve even seen people make entire city layouts out of 3d printed blocks. If you need an interior detail model you can print flat sheets of structure, and then assemble them off the bed afterwards. PLA works well for that.

both ABS and PLA are paintable, sand-able, can be printed flat and contoured to fit a curve (for curved walls that you can’t print that way, etc.)

The tricky bits with building printing is openings and windows. You can’t really print a square opening without either using support, or having a major bridging element which can lead to quality issues in presentation.

You might want to take a look at thingiverse and do a search for buildings and architecture to see examples of things people have made along those lines.

Most non printed archatextural models I have seen were made of styrene modeling plastic sheets, not Acrylic anyways. acrylic is heavy and prone to damage in shipping/

I see. Thanks piercet, you never fail to give me answer. I’ll let my friend know about this. Cheers!

Your welcome!