Source: CNC Kitchen (YouTube) Video ID: Y_vkCFwDIBY URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_vkCFwDIBY Date: 2026-07-11 Duration: 00:08:34
Around three months ago, I introduced a small tool that I made called bump mesh, which is one of the most simple ways to add a physical texture to your 3D prints. Almost half a million people watched the video. Tens of thousands tried it out, and hundreds of comments, emails, issues, and pull requests have made it way better than when I first showed it. Over the last few weeks, the community and I have added a whole range of new features and quality of life improvements. And just recently, I also made it so much faster and capable. So, let's take a look what changed. And if you haven't tried it out for a while, now is the best time to dive in again. Gag everybody. I'm Stefan and welcome to CNC Kitchen. First of all, if you've never heard of Bump Mesh before, I'm happy that you're here. Bump Mesh is a simple online tool that you can find at bump mesh.com where you can upload a 3D model and add a physical texture to it with just a few clicks. It's meant to be an easy way for everyone to improve the look of their 3D prints or even add functionality without
[00:01:02] having to blur Blender or other advanced software. One of the questions I got most often after releasing the video was what happens to your models when you upload them? And interestingly, that question also came from some larger companies. The answer is really simple. Everything is processed locally on your own machine directly inside your browser and nothing ever leaves it. And you could even run the tool completely locally because Bump Mesh is fully open source and AGPL licensed. And this is also one of the reasons why this project improved so much over the last few weeks. Many of you contributed your own implementations of new features, tipped, reported bugs, opened issues, or sent ideas. Honestly, this project made my respect for open-source maintainers grow tenfold because handling all of the issues, discussions, and pull requests is a lot of work, but I tried to implement many of the reasonable suggestions, and I'm really happy to show you what actually changed. Everyone
[00:02:00] who has been in the maker and open source community for a while now knows how awesome the people in here are, and meeting them in person, seeing what they build, and talking about their projects is even better. One of the best places for that has become open source, the Met Science Fair that is already happening for the fourth time this year. It's again at the San Mato County Event Center, only about 10 miles away from San Francisco airport. I'll be there again together with more than 100 other science creators. Open Source is a full weekend of crazy exhibits, talks, and panels from your favorite creators, and meeting a ton of like-minded people. I'm really looking forward to being there again. And if you're thinking about going there as well, grab your tickets while they're still available. I really hope to see some of you there. Now, back to BumpEsh. At first glance, the old and new version of Bump Mesh don't look that much different, but now whenever I added something new, you're greeted by a small window that shows you what has changed. Some of the biggest changes are already in the top menu. One thing many
[00:03:00] people asked for was a way to save projects or settings, and that's possible now. Up here, you can either save the whole project, including the model, or only save the setting. The language selection has also been expanded a lot from Spanish all the way to Japanese and Korean. Then there's a feature that you find in basically every larger piece of software, undo and redo. So, if you mess up something, you can now finally just reverse it. There's also a button to reset all of the settings. And by the way, that's also possible for a single setting if you just doubleclick the slider. And since we are already here, you can now also fine-tune values by clicking into the value field and scrolling with a mouse wheel. Another often requested feature was perspective view. I'm still personally not a huge fan of it for this kind of tool, but here you go. You can now toggle between perspective and autoraphic view. It was also interesting to learn about the kind of problems people run into when they are not working with clean CAD geometry. One reason why some texturing results looked bad was simply that the mesh that they
[00:04:00] use for texturing was already broken. This happens quite often with models from tools like Tinkercad. So now every time a mesh is imported, Bump Mesh runs a quick mesh check. If something looks odd, you'll get a warning. Bump mesh currently can fix these problems automatically, but you can then often repair the model directly in your slice or with one of the many online mesh repair tools. Once you've loaded your part, you can also orient it in a more sophisticated way. By the way, many of you ask for step importer files, and I promise it's coming, but step import is harder than you might think. And common step importers are tuned for visual quality, but not necessarily post-processibility of the mesh that I really need. So, I bit the bullet and actually built one myself that's specifically made for this use case. Link to the fully open source project is down in the description. One great texturing quality improvement came from Andrew Sings, who implemented a smooth transition between the textured area and the rest of the part. That means the new surface now blends much
[00:05:01] more nicely into the original geometry. Something else that can improve your results is better control over how the texture is mapped around your part, especially with cylindrical mapping. The size scaling can now snap to values where you don't get a seam, and you can now also properly place the projection cylinder. Another big challenge for good-looking surface textures is the underlying mesh that gets deformed. Sliver or needleike triangles or generally uneven mesh density can cause enormous problems. In the past, I simply refined those areas more and more, which helped a little, but it could still create strange surface artifacts at some locations. So, one of the features I spent several days working on is remshing the part with a goal of making all triangles roughly the same size and ideally close to equilateral. This is not necessarily something you'll notice directly when using the tool, but if you had parts where the textured mesh simply looked a bit strange in certain areas, the result should be now much better. Even though this feature is on by default, it is still under beta
[00:06:01] features. But honestly, I should probably just get rid of the selection. In this hidden menu, there are a few other interesting things as well. For example, you can now prevent texture displacement downwards. Imagine a 45-degree overhang. If you extruded the texture perpendicularly downwards from the surface, it can create tons of tiny islands that are hard to print. This option now only moves the mesh in X and Y, which can get rid of that problem. Another neat feature, especially if you want to apply multiple textures, is texture baking. By clicking this button, the current texture is applied to your part, and you can directly continue adding the next one without having to export and reload the model. One big reason for bad texture quality was the export settings. First of all, the resolution slider was confusing. In the old version, moving it to the left gave you more triangles because the maximum triangle size got smaller. That confused many people, and I totally understand why. So, that's now reversed. It was also always a lot of guess work and trial and error to find the right resolution for your part and texture to
[00:07:00] remove at least some of the guesswork. I implemented a small recommendation system that suggests a good export resolution and triangle number. It's not perfect, but it should get you closer and make the whole process easier. I also added 3MF export. I'm not a huge fan of 3MF either because the format can be quite a mess and everyone seems to handle it slightly differently. But here it makes a ton of sense for a simple reason and that is file size. A 3MF is basically a compressed archive. So the resulting file is significantly smaller than STL files and therefore much easier to handle. One of the biggest differences you might notice when using the tool is when exporting a file. Export is now roughly five times faster than it was in April. And because of memory optimizations, you can now work with significantly bigger models and finer details. That might actually be one of the best improvements overall. There are still many things that I would like to implement, like applying multiple textures on one go, multicolor textures like Eric recently added, and a lot more. I honestly appreciate all of
[00:08:01] the support I'm getting with this project. Whether it's from tips, code contributions, feature ideas, bug reports, or simply nice emails. It really means a lot. This project has shown me the power of open source much more directly than ever before. Until now, I was mostly a user of open source software, but now I have my own project that keeps growing thanks to you and also for you. So, I can only sincerely say thank you. And as a little spoiler, there's more cool stuff to come. Thanks for watching everyone and maybe I'll see some of you at open source.