Glossary

Plain definitions of the 3D printing terms used across X3D's India pages, from infill and purge to AMS trays and print requests, in one or two sentences each.

Terms you will meet on the India pages, in the print options or in an error message. Each definition is one or two sentences and says what the term means here, not in general. Where a term changes what you pay in India, 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. /in/print does not accept a GLB upload, so export it as STL or 3MF first.
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, which is why a sliced file cannot be changed after upload.
Manifold or watertight	A mesh whose surface is closed, with every edge shared by exactly two triangles and no holes. A mesh that is not manifold 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.
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 or 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.
Support removal	Taking the supports off before the print is sent, an option on /in/print at ₹200 once per order.
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. It 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 time, 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 how every X3D print is made; there is no resin printing here.
Filament	The plastic the printer melts, supplied as a 1.75 mm strand on a spool. X3D prints in five of them in India: 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. A mesh that will not fit inside the largest plate 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 ₹500 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 confusion when counting them.

X3D terms#

Term	What it means
Print request	How a print is ordered in India for now. After the rupee quote on /in/print, Request this print opens a short form with your name, email, city and PIN code; we reply by email with the final price and how to pay, and nothing is charged when you send it.
Print partner	The company in India that prints and delivers X3D orders for India. Prints for India are made in India and delivered across India.
Priority print	The choice (₹200, or 10% of the items when that is more, once per order) that has an order printed in 1 to 2 business days instead of the 1 to 3 of Normal print. It shortens the printing only: delivery still takes 3 to 7 days.
Billable weight	The grams you are charged for: the slice's measured filament, or a 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. The Request this print button stays closed while the model is being weighed, because the estimate undercounts thin parts with a lot of wall.
Stock colour	One of the colour swatches on /in/print. In India a colour you name instead costs the same, the material's own rate 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 why quoting the same model again is fast the second time.

Materials

PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA and TPU compared, with the rupee 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 bulk breaks 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 5 or more adds a ₹500 fee once per order line for it in India.