Glossary
Plain definitions of the 3D printing terms used across X3D — from infill and purge to AMS trays, order codes and tray mapping — in one or two sentences each.
Terms you will meet on this site, in the print options, in an error message or in an operator's notes. Each definition is one or two sentences and says what the term means here, not in general. Where a term changes what you pay, that is said too.
Files and geometry#
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Mesh | A 3D shape stored as a surface of triangles. It carries no print settings — a mesh has to be sliced before a printer can build it. |
| STL | The most common mesh format: triangles and nothing else, with no colour and no unit declaration. X3D reads an STL as millimetres. |
| GLB | Binary glTF, a mesh format that can carry colour and texture. The glTF convention is metres, so a GLB is converted to millimetres on upload — that is why a GLB authored in millimetres can arrive a thousand times too large. |
| 3MF | An archive format used for two different things: a saved slicer project, and a sliced plate export. Only the second contains G-code, and only the second can be printed. |
| G-code | The instruction list a printer follows — every move, temperature and extrusion, in order. It is written for one printer with one nozzle, so G-code sliced for another machine is rejected rather than adapted. |
| Manifold / watertight | A mesh whose surface is closed, with every edge shared by exactly two triangles and no holes. A non-manifold or leaky mesh has no well-defined inside, so its volume — and therefore its weight and price — cannot be trusted. |
| Bounding box | The smallest rectangular box the model fits inside, given as x by y by z in millimetres. It is what the build-volume check measures, and it is all /api/price quotes against — that route takes a box, never a mesh. |
| Overhang | A part of the model that leans out past what is beneath it. Past roughly 45 degrees from vertical an overhang needs supports, or it prints into air and droops. |
Slicing and print settings#
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Slicer | The program that turns a mesh into G-code by cutting it into layers and planning the toolpath for each one. X3D slices with OrcaSlicer using the official Bambu profiles, which is also where the weight in your quote comes from. |
| Layer height | How thick each printed layer is. Standard quality is 0.2 mm; Premium is 0.1 mm, which shows finer detail, takes about twice as long, and costs 1.75x the per-gram rate. |
| Infill | The lattice inside a part, given as a percentage of the internal volume. 20% is the default and is enough for most parts; raising it adds weight, and weight is what you are charged for. |
| Walls / perimeters | The solid outer shell of a part, printed before any infill. Walls are why a print is never as light as its infill percentage suggests — the quote estimate treats about 30% of the volume as solid wall. |
| Supports | Scaffolding printed under overhangs and removed afterwards. Supports are real plastic, so they arrive as grams in the slice and are paid for as grams; nothing extra is charged for having them. |
| Brim | A flat skirt of material printed around the base of a part, fused to it, to stop the first layer lifting off the plate. It is snapped off after printing. |
| Raft | A full printed platform laid down under a part, which the part is then built on top of. It uses more plastic than a brim and is used when a part barely touches the plate. |
| Elephant foot | The slight outward bulge on the first millimetre of a print, caused by the nozzle squashing the first layers onto a hot plate. It matters when a part has to fit into something at the base. |
| Purge | The filament pushed out and discarded when the printer changes from one colour to another, so no trace of the old colour is left in the nozzle. On the H2S profile a change purges 84 mm³ — which is why multi-colour prints use so much more plastic. |
| Filament change | One swap from one loaded filament to another during a print. Each change costs purge material and about 1.3 minutes, and a four-colour plate can change on nearly every layer. |
The printer#
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| FDM | Fused deposition modelling — printing by melting plastic filament and laying it down in layers. It is what every machine in the X3D fleet does; there is no resin printing here. |
| Filament | The plastic the printer melts, supplied as a 1.75 mm strand on a spool. X3D sells prints in five of them: PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA and flexible TPU. |
| Nozzle | The heated tip the plastic is pushed through. A 0.4 mm nozzle is the default; a wider one prints faster and coarser, a narrower one finer and slower. |
| Build plate | The heated bed a print is built on. The fleet's largest usable plate is 340 x 320 x 340 mm, and a mesh that will not fit inside it in any orientation is rejected at upload. |
| AMS | Bambu Lab's Automatic Material System: a four-slot unit that feeds one printer from four spools and swaps between them mid-print. Four trays is the ceiling on the filaments in one plate — and a model we slice for you uses one of them, because multi-colour is not orderable yet. |
| Tray | One slot in the AMS, holding one spool. Trays are numbered 1 to 4 on screen and 0 to 3 inside a file, which is a common source of off-by-one confusion. |
| HMS code | Bambu's own fault code, reported by the printer when something goes wrong — a jam, a failed camera check, a filament mismatch. Operators see the code in the dashboard along with whatever description the printer sent. A remedy is attached only where we have verified one, the toolhead-camera family being the best covered; nothing is invented for a code Bambu publishes no text for. |
X3D terms#
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Order code | The public reference for an order placed through the print API or the submit form at /farm/submit, in the form X3D-UUAEZ7. Paste it — or the order link containing it — into the tracker on /farm to see where the order stands. |
| Order stage | Where a customer order is in fulfilment: placed, printed, packed, shipped, delivered. The operator sets them by hand — the exception is delivered, which the nightly carrier-tracking sweep also sets on its own. Printed, shipped and delivered email you by default; placed and packed do not. |
| Print job | The farm-side record of one file on one printer, separate from your order. Its status runs UPLOADED, VALIDATING, READY, QUEUED, PRINTING, then COMPLETED — or PAUSED, FAILED or CANCELLED. |
| Reservation | A printer held for one account and driven by that account, billed by time rather than by weight: $1.50 per hour or $15.00 per day, metered from reserve to release and settled monthly. It is a different product from ordering a print — see /docs/pricing. |
| Tray mapping | The list that tells a printer which AMS tray feeds which filament in a sliced file: the first entry is the tray for the file's first filament, and so on. Get the order wrong and the print comes out in the wrong colours, so a mapping is accepted or rejected whole and never partly applied. |
| Tray snapshot | A record of what was loaded in each chosen tray at the moment a job was queued, stored as type and colour. Before the job starts it is compared with what is loaded now, so a job whose spool was swapped stops and asks instead of printing in the wrong plastic. |
| Billable weight | The grams you are charged for: the slice's measured filament, or a pre-sliced file's own figure, rounded up to the whole gram. Rounding up keeps the quote in step with Bambu Studio, which also displays whole grams. |
| Measured vs estimated | A measured quote comes from a real slice of your file; an estimated one is computed from the model's volume before a slice has finished. Checkout will not sell an unmeasured print, because the estimate undercounts thin, wall-heavy parts. |
| Stock colour | One of the twelve colours kept on the shelf, which print at the material's normal rate. Any other colour means buying a spool for that order, and is charged at a floor of $0.20 per gram. |
| Generation | The stored record of one model you uploaded or generated, holding the file, its validation result and its cached slice. It is what a cart item and an order both point at, which is why re-quoting the same model is fast the second time. |