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 prints exactly as exported. A project is sliced by us, and when it assigns two or more filaments it can be printed in those colours.
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. One unit holds four filaments; a second, chained on by hand for the job, takes a print to eight and adds the $25 second-AMS fee.
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 number	The number a paid website order is known by, such as 2610019: the year and month, then that month's count. Only a paid order takes one, so the numbers run without gaps. Orders from before numbering keep an id starting CART-, ORD- or STORE-.
Order stage	Where a customer order is in fulfilment: placed, queued, printed, packed, shipped, delivered, or for an order you collect, placed, queued, printed, Ready for pickup and Picked up. Most are set by a person as the work happens; printed is also set by itself when the order's last plate finishes on the farm's queue, and delivered by the nightly carrier-tracking sweep. Every stage after placed emails you by default.
Payment link	A page at x3dstudios.com/pay/<id> we send for an order agreed by email, message or phone. It shows the agreed items and total, can be paid once without an account, does not expire, and becomes a numbered order when it is paid.
Priority print	The checkout choice ($5, or 10% of the items when that is more, once per order) that puts an order first in the print queue so it ships in 1–2 business days instead of the 4–5 of Normal print. It is separate from express shipping, which shortens only the time with the carrier.
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; flexible TPU, already above it, stays at $0.25.
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.

Materials

PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA and TPU compared, with the price and the failure modes.

File formats

What each format is, what we do with it, and why OBJ is not accepted.

Pricing model

Where billable weight, the quality factor and the minimum come from.

Questions

What is the difference between a mesh and G-code?

A mesh is a shape — a surface of triangles with no print settings in it. G-code is the instruction list a specific printer follows to build that shape, and it already contains the layer height, infill, supports and speeds.

What does infill mean?

The internal lattice that fills the hollow space inside a printed part. It is given as a percentage: 20% infill means the inside is mostly air with a supporting grid, which is enough for most parts and much cheaper than solid.

What is an AMS?

Bambu Lab's Automatic Material System: a four-slot unit that feeds a printer from four spools and swaps between them mid-print. A second unit chained on takes a print to eight filaments, which is the most X3D prints in one part, and a print using five or more adds a $25 fee once per order line for it.