How I built a cel-shaded 3D printer model

Placeholder post: this is sample text, not a real build log. Replace this file (src/content/blog/build-log-placeholder.md) with a real post, or delete it.

The goal

I wanted the printer on my site to look hand-drawn: flat colors, a few bands of shade, and a thick outline, like a cartoon. The model started life as a CAD file, so the first job was getting it into the browser at all.

What went wrong

The first version loaded fine and looked awful. Every curved surface had hundreds of tiny triangles, and the outline pass drew a line along every one of them. The fix was to merge vertices before computing normals:

const merged = mergeVertices(geometry, 1e-4);
merged.computeVertexNormals();

After that, the shading bands lined up and the outline only traced real edges.

What I’d do next time

• Simplify the mesh before it ever reaches the browser.
• Test the look on a cheap laptop first, not my fastest machine.