STL FX – Glitch & Inflate Your 3D Models

Drop in an STL (or remix the bundled #3DBenchy), dial in glitch and inflate, and download a print-ready STL. Everything runs in your browser - your model never leaves your device, and a watertight model in stays watertight out.

or drag & drop an STL onto the viewer (binary or ASCII)

Effects

Seed 1
Binary STL in mm. Keep inflate/glitch moderate to avoid self-intersections and walls below your printer's minimum feature size.

How STL FX works

STL files are a "triangle soup" with no shared vertices, so the first step is to weld coincident vertices into a real mesh. From there, every effect is a manifold-preserving deformation: it only moves existing welded vertices, never cutting or adding boundaries. That keeps a watertight model watertight, which is what you need for 3D printing.

  • Inflate / deflate pushes each vertex along its surface normal - positive puffs the model up like a balloon, negative shrinks it inward.
  • Glitch slices the model into horizontal bands by height and shifts each band by a seeded random offset, for that data-moshed "glitched Benchy" look. The seed makes it repeatable; Shuffle rolls a new one.
  • Jitter adds fine per-vertex noise on top, like surface grain.

The model is rendered live with WebGL and drag-to-orbit controls, and exports as a binary STL in millimeters. The bundled example is the public-domain #3DBenchy by Creative Tools.

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