The Big Question—What is 3D Printing? - 3D Printing: Build your Own 3D Printer and Print your own 3D Objects - page 6

Say Hello to Plastic!
Think about this for a moment: You print out a black square on a sheet of paper
and then cut it out with some scissors. You then place that black square on a table.
Next, you print out another black square, cut it out, and stack it on top of the previ-
ous black cube. Do this 500 times. Are you seeing what's happening to that stack
of black squares? Is it starting to look like a cube?
Note
Depending on the thickness of your paper and the size of the square,
you might have to print and stack 200, 500, or even 1,000 squares to
make it look like a cube. (And I don't recommend that you actually do
this. Save the paper and some trees and just imagine all those stacked
squares, and you get the idea.)
What you're seeing happen here is due to layering. If you could peel the ink off
each piece of paper (and have it hold its shape) and then stack all those black
squares like the ones in Figure 1.4 , you'd (hopefully) have a solid black cube con-
sisting of dozens, or hundreds, or maybe even thousands of layers.