About Wilhelmus3D

How to use textures for 3D printing
in Blender

Using textures for 3D printing in Blender can create a stunning effect, but can also give you quite a headache when you want to print it.

  • Date: 24 July 2025
  • Theme: Blender
  • Project: Use Textures

What you need

To pull this off you will need the following:

 

  • A texture depth map
  • Blender
  • Slicer for your printer
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You will need to install Blender first, if you have not done this already.
This tutorial assumes you have some knowledge of Blender.
Get Blender
After installing Blender you will need a plugin called 3D Print Toolbox

To find it go in the menu to: Edit / Preferences / Add-ons and find the 3D toolbox.
This add-on is to check if your file has no errors

Getting a Depthmap

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Step 1

Go to Polyhaven/textures
Browse Textures
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Step 2

Download the texture (2K is okay)
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Step 3

Find the depthmap in the zip, this will have ‘disp_2k’ in it, and save it in your project folder

Do not forget to support Polyhaven for making great content.

Now that we have all the essentials we can start making our texture.

subdivide

Step 1 Subdivide your  surface

In order to use the displacement you will have to subdivide the surface in a way that you have enough mesh to place the texture on.

  • Go to edit mode
  • Select your surface
  • Right click and choose “subdivide”

 

subdivide-2

Step 2 Subdivide your  surface part 2

On the bottom part of the screen a settings box will appear

  • If it is closed press the arrow to open it up
  • Put in your number of cuts
  • Press enter to confirm

You might want to repeat this step to make it more dense

 

assign-group

Step 3 Save your selection

In the object data  properties save your selection

  • Be sure your grid is selected
  • Press the “+” to add a group
  • Press assign to save the selection

This will be used later to assign the pattern to the selection only

 

assign-group

Step 4 Displacement modifier

Prepare the modifier

  • Press “Add Modifier”, then “Deform/ Displace”
  • Set coordinates to UV Map (works on round objects too)
  • Select Vertex Group (the selection from the previous step)

This will be used to set the displacement

 

assign-group

Step 5 Select your texture

Prepare the texture

  • Select the texture menu tab
  • Open the displacement file you downloaded from Poly haven
  • Name your texture (optional)
  • Select the texture in displacement modifier

This will be used to set the texture

 

Some final thoughts on Textures for 3D printing

If you do not start with a plane or a thin surface you will run into trouble, your file will not be manifold and hard to fix.

The created file can be added to a surface and you can use modifiers to cut off parts to get a flat surface for printing.

Avoid too many subdivisions or Blender will crash or the modifiers will take forever. 

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Use the “Decimate” modifier to simplify the mesh. Use the collapse tab. The Ratio is best to be between 0.3 and 0.6.

Apply and repeat the modifier until you start to see loss of detail.

I hope this tutorial was helpfull.

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