Advice on Printing a Stone Fountain

[curious aardvark]

well the texturing can be done in the design process, that's not the problem :-)

Making a 3d print watertight can be a tricky process, you all but need to print it completely solid.

Most fdm 3d prints consist of a 'skin' often less than a millimetre thick over a mesh of infinitely variable shape and density.
The on;y way I've been able to make something completely watertight was by making it totally solid. Which slows things down and uses a lot of material.

So yes, technically you could make a watertight fountain with a textured skin - though that kind of modelling is not somethig I've had any experience with no doubt there are modelling programs that let you pick and choose from any number of textured surfaces.

To get the stone effect, there are filaments that simulate a marble like appearance, couple that with a textured surface and a solid print and some kind of lacquer paint to give it a more gloss or matt finish - and yes it is possible to make something very similiar to your pictures.

Not easy, or particular cheap - but definitely doable.

to illustrate what I mean about 3d printing creating meshes with skins look at this picture:

printer extrusions.jpg

THose are approximately 30% mesh infills. I use a tringular infill pattern as it prints fast and give equal strength in all directions.
The individual wall lines are all 0.5mm thick. As that's the diameter of the nozzle I use in this particular printer.

Given how little those kinds of desktop water feature cost - 3d printing them would seem to be an awful lot of effort in both time and money.
And also not a beginner piece of design either.

A resin machine could make a watertight model easier - but resin is messy stuff and as it turns ut pretty damn toxic. So I've gone right off them :-)

For about $100,000 you can buy a binderjet printer that will produce things with full colour and different materials.
For about $80,000 you can get a printer that will make small ones out of metal :-)

In some ways it's all about budget, but in all cases you still need to be a skilled enough designer to actually make the 3d models for the machine to print.

So yes, absolutely it can be done and pretty much at all budget levels, with varying degrees of post processing - the printing is not so much the issue as the designing of the thing to be printed.