3D printing pixel art

Pixel art extrudes into a shape a slicer can handle, but two failure modes are specific to it. The exporter checks for both before you print.

Exporting

Pick the 3D print target. It writes a solid STL at one unit per pixel. STL itself stores no units at all, but slicers read a unit as a millimetre, so a 16×16 sprite arrives about 16 mm tall - scale it up under Advanced if you want more than a trinket.

The mesh is built as a closed shell, so it normally slices without a repair pass. That is not a guarantee: the two checks below look for separate solids and knife-edge joints, not for wall thickness, nozzle width, supports or bed size. Check the dimensions your slicer reports before you print.

Loose parts

Pixel art often contains pixels that look connected on screen but are separate solids in 3D - an eye floating inside a face, a detached highlight. Those come off the printer as loose pieces. The check counts the separate solids and tells you how many there are, so you can connect them deliberately or accept them as intentional parts.

Knife-edge joints

Two pixels touching only at a corner form a joint with effectively no cross-section. It prints, then snaps the moment you handle it. The check flags these, and the fix is always the same: overlap the parts by at least one full cell so there is real material at the joint.

Practical sizing

Keep the grid small. A 16×16 sprite at a sensible print scale gives cells that are thick enough to survive handling; a 64×64 sprite at the same overall size gives you cells near the nozzle width, where fine detail simply will not resolve.