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How-To Printables.Com Website

How to Post a Model on Printables.com

Post a Model

Login to Printables with your username and password.
In the upper-right hand side of the screen, click the “+ Create” button (highlighted in yellow, below).

Select “Model” (in yellow, below) to upload a design that you have made or modified.

The minimum information that you will need to provide:

  • A 3-D model file of your design (.stl, .3mf, .step, sl1s, .stp, .amf, .obj)
  • A picture of your model (.jpg, .gif, .png). This should preferably be a photo of the model printed out if possible, but a screenshot of a preview or render also seems to be acceptable.
  • A name for your model
  • A short summary of your model
  • A category your model should be listed in (selected from a provided list
  • Which license you wish to publish your model under

Enter and upload the required information and you are ready to publish your model for all to see.

If you aren’t ready to publish yet, leave the slider on ‘Draft’ and press the “SAVE DRAFT” button to save your draft for later use. When you are ready to publish your design publicly, click the Draft/Publish slider over to ‘Publish’ and then press the “PUBLISH NOW”.

Keep in mind that publishing is not a final, permanent decision. You can continue to edit your model and all fields about your model. If you decide there was a mistake or you want to retract your publish, simply slide the slider back to ‘Draft’ and press the “SAVE DRAFT” button to make it private again.

Additional fields

Above we addressed the minimal, required fields to publish your design to printables.com. There are a number of other optional fields you should consider completing to help the site and other users find your model more easily, categorize your model, or use your model more effectively. These include:

  • Additional Tags
  • linking Remix files (reference the original files)
  • a detailed Description
  • any other supporting files (.txt, .pdf (instructions))
  • Print files (.gcode, .sl1)

You can also re-arrange your photographs that you uploaded and choose which one will be used as a cover photo (‘set as cover’) for your object in the 3-D Models index on printables.com.

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About Us Tech

My 3-D Story

I have been doing 3-D modeling and 3-D printing since 2011.

I started out with a RepRapPro Mendel TriColour that I built from a parts kit and upgraded several times. This was a great printer, but was frankly borderline experimental. Everything had to be frequently adjusted by hand and successful prints were occasional (maybe 50% at its best.)

My second printer was a cousin to the first, a Prusa I3 MK3 (now an S) built from a kit that I got in November 2018. The improvements from the first to second printer include: auto bed levelling, filament run-out detection, magnetic spring steel flexible print plate, Bondtech dual gear extrusion system, custom E3D V6 all-metal hot end and resume on power failure. Basically, it has improved every area that could have been considered weak or unreliable through iterative engineering. The printer has been an absolute workhorse (currently at 29 kilometers of filament extruded) and my print success rate is more like 98%. Don’t call it fool-proof (they’ll invent a better fool) but it is a solid, consistent performer.

Over the last twelve years I tried a variety of (mostly open source) slicers with varying degrees of success. SkeinForge, Slic3r, Repetier, Cura, KISSlicer, IceSL. Prusa forked Slic3r into PrusaSlicer which is currently the best, most integrated, and extensively developed slicer option available.

I’ve made extensive use of Blender, OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and a variety of other open source, free, and for-pay, commercial software over the years to do design, object repair, object modifications, customizations.