3D imaging is a powerful tool that in recent years has become an industry standard in interior design. Why bother with sketches when you can render a whole project customize, tweak, and tune it to perfection? The flexibility 3D imaging offers is what made it a cornerstone in the design industry but when moving from vectors to reality some difficulties can occur. Enter 3D printing –

When bringing a 3D image to life 3D printing can do wonders but it is only in the past few months that designers have started to experiment with 3D printing and light. Design is an art that focuses on the finer details and 3D printing offers any designer the opportunity to customize their work by adding the finishing touch: a perfect carbon copy of the lightning and lamps you designed.

3D printing is easily used with a variety of materials to create a unique feel to each lamp or light printed. The translucency, color, and texture are easy to customizable and the results can be quite breath- taking:

This Dragon Fly lamp was designed to resemble an insect’s eye but is in fact created by letting the light reflect off of honeycomb like hexagons and create a dawn-like radiance.

Another example is this Tulip Lamp, printed as a fixture and mounted on a standard lightbulb:

Both of these lamps take advantage of the properties of 3D printing to create an elaborate, one of a kind item but there are other ways to use the technology. For example, in this Reaction Lamp both the intricacy and material properties were taken into account to create a feeling of transparency:

The finished lamp looks and feels like an organic object that was taken out of a coral reef and placed on your dining-room table.

Personally, I am looking forwards to seeing how 3D printing will affect interior design. If future results will be half as impressive as what we see here we have a lot to look forwards to.