Customizable, Parametric Coaster & Holder Sets

This is parametric, customizable coaster set I designed. 

There are two coaster shapes to choose from, square or round. You can change the coaster size, thickness, quantity and whether or not you'll use something on the bottom of the coasters, like rubber feet or cork. This generates a set of your desired quantity of coasters along with two different holders, flat and standing. From there, you can add SVG files to your coasters, which we'll do later on, to make some amazing multi-color designs. Or you can just print them plain in a filament color/finish of your choice.

You can also use the blank coaster as a base for a sign, or piece of wall art.

Let's make a set.

The first thing you want to do is decide how many coasters you want, what size you want them to be, and how thick you want them to be. You also need to decide whether or not you'll be using anything on the bottom of your coasters; adhesive-backed cork is a popular choice; stick-on rubber bumpers work as well. I prefer either no backing or cork. If you decide to add a bottom to your coasters, you need to know the thickness of the material you'll be adding so we can enter that later on in the generator.  For this example, we'll keep it simple and not have any backing.
 

The defaults are usually what I go with when making my own coaster sets: quantity of 4, 100mm size (diameter for round coasters, width and length for square coasters), 4mm thickness. For this example, we'll make square coasters.

So after we enter those values in the generator and press the Generate buttons, you'll have your coaster set consisting of four coasters (or however many you entered in the generator), a holder that holds your coasters in a vertical position, and a holder that holds them in a flat position. You can then download your coaster set an stl or 3mf file. Either will work; you'll need to do some work in Bambu Studio either way. We'll download them as a 3mf file in this example. 

The first thing you'll likely need to do is add a plate. You can do so by clicking on the icon below:

The next thing you'll need to do is right click on the set of coasters, and select Split → To Objects. As downloaded, the coasters and holders are merged together as a single object. Splitting them lets you move each individual piece freely, and make any modifications, like adding svg files.

You'll need to arrange the coasters and holders on the plates so everything prints without incident. I usually put the coasters on one plate, the holders on another, like so:

Remember to save your progress as you work, and if desired, save it as a new file so you still have the original should you want to make changes in the future. What I usually do when working with a downloaded 3mf file, is right away after opening it, click “File → Save As”, and give it a new file name so I know which one has any changes I've made.

Since we're only making a set of four coasters, we don't need both holders. I'll stick with printing the flat holder since it takes less time and uses less filament. So I'll simply highlight the standing holder and delete it.

So coasters and holders arranged on the plates, material type and settings confirmed, now you can send it off to your printer.

While you can print them with PLA, I highly recommend using PETG since it's a bit more heat resistant and is less prone to warping. If you do use PLA, make sure you let the plate completely cool before removing to minimize any warping. The same goes for PETG; let the plate cool before removing the prints. In the case of PETG, it's less to prevent warping and more to ensure the print removes cleanly. If you get any stress marks on the bottom of the prints (these look like white “stains” on the print), a quick once-over with a culinary torch will remove them.

So that's a basic set of coasters. Here's how they turned out:
I printed the holder with Lake Blue Bambu PETG HF and the coasters with Burnt Titanium Voxelab PETG. 

Now let's add some flair to our coasters and add a simple svg file. There's plenty of tutorials on how to get svg files, and tons of places to get them from, so I won't go to much into that, but I'll demonstrate how I take a prepared svg file, import it into bambu studio, and apply it to the coasters. Etsy is a great place to get high quality svg files, but if you're proficient in a vector art program like inkscape, illustrator or coreldraw, you can make your own from scratch, or trace a png file in the program, then export it as an svg. I know there's png to svg converters online, but I don't have much experience with those. So to keep this simple, I'll just use an svg that's ready to go.

There's two ways I've used to add svg files to a project; the first is a simple import via right clicking on a part, selecting "Add Part", then selecting SVG at the bottom. This works best for simple, single color designs. The other works best for multi-color designs. Instead of using the "Add Part" function to add the svg file, you just drag and drop  your svg file into bambu studio, or import it via the File→Import function (Ctrl+I). 

If you'll be adding the same design to all of your coasters, the easiest way is to delete all of the coasters aside from one. You'll add your svg file to that coaster, then copy and paste, or use the “Clone” function to make the amount of coasters you want. For this first example, we'll do it this way, and add a basic tribal fish design to our coasters.

Ok, so we have our single coaster ready. What we need to do now is right click on the coaster, “Add Part”, and the select “SVG” at the bottom:

Navigate to your prepared svg file and click on “Open”. The SVG window will pop up and your svg file will be shown on the coaster like so:

There's a few changes we'll need to make to ensure we get everything working correctly.

I like to adjust the size and position first. Adjusting the size is easy enough to do; simply use the adjustment slider or enter an exact value by clicking the edit icon on the far right. Once it's the correct size, you can use the small yellow square in the center of the svg to drag the svg file to the correct position.

I then change the “Depth” to 1mm. That means that the svg will be 1mm deep into the coaster. That's good enough for most colors; sometimes if I'm using translucent colors I'll do 2mm.

The last step is to make sure that under “Operation” at the bottom of the svg import window, “Modifier” is checked.

This is what it will look like after doing the steps mentions:

Now you can click out of the svg import window and make sure the colors are correct. To do this, on the left of the Bambu Studio window where you change all your print settings, next to “Process” click on “Objects”. This changes the window to an object tree view. From there, just locate the svg file (it'll be grouped with the coaster). There's two ways you can change the color. First, you can right click on the svg file in the process tree and select “Change Filament”, but an easier way is to click on the svg file to highlight it, and then press the number on your keypad that corresponds to the color under “Project Filaments” that you want the svg file to be. In this example, I'm making a coaster with a Blue PETG HF body and the tribal fish will be Lime Green PETG HF. So I'll click on the svg file, and in this case, press “5” to change the fish to Lime Green. The coaster body was already the correct color, but if I needed to change it, the process is the same; select the coaster to highlight it, then press the number that corresponds to Blue PETG HF, 3 in this instance.

Note that after adding a second color, a purge tower is added. I'll move the coaster out of the way since it's overlapping with it.

Almost ready to print.

But there's something thing I like to do. I prefer the look the textured PEI plate gives to the coasters, so I want that to be the show side. So all we need to do is click on the coaster to highlight it, then at the top click the ‘Lay on Face" button (or press “F” on the keyboard), and click on the face of the coaster that should be highlighted in white. It’ll flip the coaster over so the face with the embedded fish design is now face down.

Now you can decide how many coasters you want. I'll just be printing the one, but if you wanted a set of four, you can add three more coasters by either clicking on the coaster to highlight it, copy (Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+V), or right click on the coaster, select “Clone” and enter "3" for a total of four coasters, which is what the sample print profile will have.

We can now slice and this is the result:

Finally we can send it off to print!

Here's the end result:

With some creativity, you can make some really amazing coasters. This is a set I made inspired by one of my favorite gaming series, Metroid.

The filaments used to make this set was: Bambu PETG HF in Black, Orange, Yellow, Lake Blue, Bambu PETG Translucent Teal, Atomic Ruby Red Translucent PETG and Giantarm White PETG. 

Let's make the above pictured Screw Attack symbol coaster now. We'll use a round, 100mm coaster blank.

It's still fairly simple, but uses all four colors of a single AMS or AMS lite. If you have multiple AMS units (Not the AMS lite; the A1 and A1 mini only support a single AMS Lite), you can have even more colors. The process would mostly be the same, you'd just have more colors to set.

We currently can't use the method of right clicking on the blank coaster, then selecting “Add Part”, then "SVG" here. The imported svg will be a solid block of the silhouette with no way to split to objects, so we'll have to drag and drop the svg into bambu studio, or use the import function (Ctrl+I). It seems that when using the “Add Part→SVG” function doesn't like when the svg file has lines that touch. You can see this with the Screw Attack symbol when imported using that function (I made the svg yellow for visibility here):

The parts of the symbol are separated already since black is the 4th color and will be the coaster body color, but notice that the blue outline around the S is gone. You can use the painting tool to color the individual parts, but you still lose some of the design:

So we'll do it in a way I've found that works. There's a bit more work involved, but you get the desired results.

First, make sure you don't have the coaster blank selected.

Now you can either drag and drop the svg from its file folder to Bambu Studio, or use the "File→Import" (Ctrl+I) function and then select the svg and click on “Open”. either way will bring the svg file in like so:

Notice that on the left under the "Process" tab, each part is individually listed, just what we need for coloring, which we'll do now.

It's the same process as before; click on the object to highlight it, then press the number key on your keyboard that corresponds to the color you want the object to be. It helps to have a reference image available so you color everything correctly. A helpful tip for when you have multiple objects that need to be the same color, you can hold “Ctrl” on your keyboard and click on each of the parts that will be the same color to highlight them all at once. Then press the number key of the color they need to be and it colors them all at once.

After applying the correct colors, we'll end up here:

Almost ready to print, we just need to position the svg onto the coaster, and set the correct height (by default it imports at 10mm thick).

First we'll set the inlay to the correct thickness. To do that, just click on the svg to highlight it, then click on the Scale icon at the top of the screen ("S" on the keyboard). Uncheck “uniform scale”, and enter a value of "1" in the Z column. Now we can position it so it's centered on the coaster. There's a few ways to do this, but the easiest way is to center the coaster blank on the plate by highlighting it, then right clicking on it and selecting “Center”. Then do the same for the inlay. Before you center the inlay though, you need to flip it over since it will be on the bottom of the coaster now, and if printed as as, it'll be mirrored backwards. So highlight the inlay, click the Lay on Face button on the toolbar at the top ("F"), and click the top of the inlay. This will correctly orient the coaster so when printed, it won't be backwards. Keep in mind that you can also position the svg file just by clicking and dragging it; this works if you don't want it to be perfectly centered on the coaster body.

Now we can position it as outlined earlier.

Note that the icon won't be visible any more since it's under the coaster body. It's still there though, so don't worry.

Now we need to merge the inlay with the coaster body. To do this, hold "Ctrl" and click on the coaster and then the svg file under the Process tab. Now with both the coaster body and svg file selected, right click on either the visible coaster body, or on the highlighted file names under the Process tab, and select “Merge”. Now you can Copy and Paste, or Clone your completed coaster until you have the quantity desired.

Before we send the coasters off to the printer, there's a few important setting we should change for best results.

They're all under the “Quality” tab in the “Global” settings section. To get to the Global settings, just look next to “Process” tab and click on the “Global” button, then make sure you're on the “Quality” tab.

The first setting we want to change is under “Wall Generator”. We want to change that from “Classic” to “Arachne”. This will do a better job at filling in the small gaps that can happen in designs with areas that come to a fine point.

The next setting we want to change is “Initial Flow Ratio”. We want to increase it a bit so the first layer flow is increased a bit to help with filling in the small gaps, just like with changing the Wall Generator to Arachne. You'll want to do some test prints to see which ratio works best for the filament you're using.

The last setting we want to change is “Only one wall on first layer”. This does just that; creates only a single wall on the first layer. This makes for a cleaner appearance on the printed coaster since you'll only have the single line around your design instead of however many walls you set (the default being 2). You can see the difference in the pic below; the left is default settings, the right is with the changes we made:

And finally we can slice and print!

To confirm everything is as it should be, after slicing and while on the preview screen, you can click and drag the plate so you're viewing the underside: 

Looks good!

Now we can send them off to the printer and a few hours later, have our beautiful, customized coasters and holder ready to go!

I hope this help out!

Remember, you can add an svg to the holder too if you want; I usually just leave them blank.

Any questions or insights are appreciated!

Thanks for stopping by! 🍻