u/irrfin

I know most of what I post here is 3D-printed/AI-assisted, and I got a fair amount of pushback on that last time. Fair enough — but the AI stuff isn’t where I started, it’s just the newest branch of something I’ve been doing with clay and glaze for 30 years. These are a handful of hand-built pieces from that longer history, a tiny sample of what’s actually behind the printer work. Video’s on my kid’s pottery wheel since a photo doesn’t do the glaze justice.

Longer cut of the same thing. Every one of these started as an AI-generated mesh that looked completely fine before it hit the printer.

Slumps, tears, walls that gave out three layers from the top, seams that opened on the way down. A few made it through the print and cracked drying.

Nothing about generated geometry accounts for what wet clay actually does. Posting it because the successful ones give a pretty misleading impression of how this goes.

Been running AI-generated meshes through a clay printer for a few months. People see the ones that worked, so here’s the rest.

The mesh always comes out watertight and looks fine on screen. It has no idea what wet clay will hold. Overhangs that a slicer accepts just slump. Wall thickness comes out wherever the generator felt like putting it, so every file gets rebuilt by hand before it’s printable. Detail that looks great in the render disappears at bead width. And nothing upstream knows the piece is going to lose 10–15% on the way to fired.

Getting one of these to stand up takes way more work than the finished photos suggest.

I’ve been printing in clay for a while and started experimenting with generating forms instead of modeling them. Workflow was: text prompt → image generation → multi-view renders → image-to-mesh (Meshy) → STL → slicer → DIW clay extrusion. Prompts were style-based, in this case H.R. Giger and H.P. Lovecraft.

What I expected to be the hard part — getting a watertight mesh — wasn’t. What broke things:

**•**	Generated geometry has no concept of overhang limits, so a lot of what came out was unprintable in wet clay without support I can’t use

**•**	Wall thickness is arbitrary and had to be rebuilt manually to stay above \~3mm

**•**	Surface detail that reads well in the render disappears entirely once you’re extruding a bead, then reappears wrong after shrinkage

**•**	Nothing in the pipeline knows the model is going to shrink 10–15%

Net result is that the AI output is a starting silhouette, not a printable file. Every one needed real mesh work before slicing.

Curious whether anyone here has found a generator or a workflow step that produces geometry with any awareness of extrusion constraints, or whether everyone’s doing the same manual cleanup. Also interested if anyone’s tried going straight to a lathe-style profile instead of a full mesh.

Happy to answer questions about the clay side — I glazed these with raku and I teach chemistry, so that part I can actually explain.

Using my Eazao M500. Some of the colors are from the clay with a clear raku crackle. The blue clay piece I acid etched after glazing. Some of the yellow colors are from iron and antinomy. The get colors are are actual silver metal I was able to reduce from silver nitrate.

If anyone needs glazing help feel free to PM me.

I’ve been working with clay for over 30 years and the 3d printer is a game changer.

Among other things I’m mostly a ceramic artist. But I also am a science educator and explorer.

I started with the idea to make wind chimes from ceramics and other items from our home we have collected over the years. My brother saw this piece and said I might be doing some intuitive Wiccan or related practices without knowing it. I’m cautiously posting on this community to see what members have to say. I’m not intending to sell these pieces. All the items in the art have personal stories about how I collected them.

I look forward to your feedback.

Honestly I think people are kind of screwing themselves by rushing into Act 3.

Act 2 is where the game actually gives you room to figure stuff out. Explore. Build Hornet up. Get better at the systems before the game gets way more brutal.

The turning point for me was going back to the Blasted Steps and realizing she was gone.

That was the moment where I was like, oh ok. This is bigger than I thought.

And seriously. Finish everything you can in Act 2 before moving on. I missed the High Halls thing, which I won’t spoil, and now I’m realizing some Act 3 stuff is way harder or maybe just not really doable if you skipped things earlier.

Right now I’m stuck trying to activate the Sentinel Last Audience because I didn’t do it in Act 2.

Which is pretty annoying honestly. The game does not exactly warn you about this.

Pic credit: my tv