STL FX – Glitch, Melt & Remix Your 3D Models

How STL FX works

STL files are a "triangle soup" with no shared vertices, so STL FX first welds coincident vertices into a real mesh and records each vertex's neighbours. Every effect is then a manifold-preserving deformation - it only moves existing welded vertices, never cutting or adding boundaries - so a watertight model stays watertight, which is what 3D printing needs.

• Inflate pushes vertices along their normals (balloon out, or negative to shrink).
• Smooth runs Laplacian smoothing to round things off; Sharpen is an unsharp mask that exaggerates edges and detail.
• Melt slumps the whole block uniformly - the top sinks and the base spreads, like a butter sculpture in the sun.
• Gravity sag droops overhangs and appendages like a cantilever - the further a feature sticks out (and the higher it sits), the more its tip sags, while the supported base stays put.
• Twist rotates each layer about the vertical axis by height; Taper widens or narrows toward the top.
• Glitch slices the model into height bands and shifts each by a seeded random offset (the data-moshed look); Jitter adds fine grain.
• Voronoi carves the surface into cells - positive depth engraves the cells, negative raises them. Shuffle re-seeds the pattern.
• Support saver looks at the model in its current orientation, finds downward-facing overhangs steeper than your Overhang angle (45° from vertical by default - the angle a printer can manage unsupported), and rounds and lifts them so fewer need support material. It's a softening pass, not a guaranteed slicer-angle fix, so check the preview. Use the Flip buttons first to pick the orientation you'll print in.
• Flatten base pins the bottom band back onto one flat plane, undoing the jagged bed face that jitter, glitch, or gravity can leave behind, so the print sits flat.

Effects run as a pipeline - drag the chips at the top of the Effects panel to change the order they apply in. Order matters: twisting then tapering looks different from tapering then twisting. Shuffle all randomizes every effect and the pipeline order for a surprise remix, while Shuffle seed only re-rolls the random pattern. Heavy deflate or voronoi can fold the surface onto itself and create non-manifold or stray triangles - the Manifold and hole-repair buttons re-weld the export and clean those up.

Use the Flip buttons to reorient the model on the X, Y, or Z axis. The bundled example is the public-domain #3DBenchy by Creative Tools.