A methodology for evaluating the aesthetic quality of 3D printed parts

Nowadays, 3D printing is recognized as one of the key technologies that enables the distributed manufacturing adoption. However, inexperienced people might perceive this technology as far from easy user-usability because of evident aesthetic defects on 3D printed parts. In this paper, an indicator-based methodology is proposed for the assessment and the ranking of the aesthetic capability of 3D printers by evaluating the ability of a 3D printer to reproduce a reference part without defects. The reference part includes several geometric features that characterize most of as-built aesthetic defects. In addition, a benchmarking analysis was carried out to show an example of the methodology applied to three different machines.