Pick a Pattern
Hex
Classic honeycomb. Structurally strongest tessellation, prints cleanly with no support material. Default and best starting point.
Square
Modern grid. Easiest to align between tiled panels because every cell is identical — no offset row pattern to worry about.
Triangle
The most rigid pattern in this set. Triangle cells resist sag, so you can drop wall thickness lower than with hex without the panel flexing.
Voronoi
Organic, randomised cells. Each seed value (1–200) produces a different layout — click through seeds until one looks right.
Cell Size vs Wall Width
This is the key trade-off. The two numbers together set the visual weight and the structural strength.
- Cell Size 20–30 mm with a Wall Width of 2–3 mm gives a balanced, lightweight look. Use this as the starting point.
- Drop cell size below 12 mm and the pattern reads as texture rather than geometry — closer to a 3D-printed acoustic tile.
- Push cell size above 40 mm and the panel feels sparse and cathedral-like — great for accent walls, less so for full coverage.
Make sure wall width is a clean multiple of your nozzle's extrusion width (0.4 / 0.8 / 1.2 / 1.6 mm) so the slicer extrudes solid walls without gap-filling. Mismatched widths produce visible interior lines.
Border for Mounting
Border Width 8–15 mm gives a continuous frame around the tessellation. The border is also where you can drill or add mounting clips after printing — never mount through a tessellated cell, the wall will crack along the cell boundary.
For panels that will hang flush against a wall with adhesive (3M Command, double-sided foam tape) you can drop the border to 5 mm; for screw-mounted panels keep it at 12–15 mm so the mounting hole has plastic on every side.
Tile Across Plates
For walls bigger than your printer, set Width and Height to your printer's bed size minus 10 mm of brim margin (e.g. 246 mm on a 256 mm bed), then generate multiple panels and arrange them edge-to-edge on the wall.
Square and Hex patterns can be designed to interlock perfectly across panel borders — line up the cell size with the panel size so a cell never gets cut in half. For Hex specifically, panel width should be a clean multiple of 1.5 × cell-size.
Big Wall, Many Plates
Generate the full panel as one giant STL, then drop it through Slicer Pro for an automatic split with alignment keys, or use the Build Plate Packer if you generated each tile separately. Either workflow lets you fill an entire 2×2 m feature wall on a desktop printer.
Print Settings That Just Work
- Print panel face-down on the bed. The face becomes a perfectly smooth surface for paint.
- 0.2 or 0.24 mm layers — panels do not need fine layer detail, faster layers = faster panels.
- Walls / perimeters set to fill the chosen wall width exactly. Infill = 0% (the geometry is already a frame).
- Paint after printing: a satin spray primer + acrylic topcoat looks identical to a powder-coated metal panel.
Pairs Well With…
- Slicer Pro — chop oversized panels into tiles with hidden alignment keys at the cell boundaries.
- Build Plate Packer — pack 16 small tiles per plate when running a wall as a tile mosaic.
- Nameplate Generator — combine a tessellated wall panel with a coordinated room sign.