3D printed Christmas ornaments with names (free generators)

Every December somebody asks me for "just one more" ornament with a name on it. Then it's a cousin's kid, then the whole class, then the neighbours. Typing twenty names into a CAD sketch, one by one, is the kind of job that kills the Christmas mood fast.

So this year I stopped doing it by hand. I built three generators for 3D printed Christmas ornaments with names - a reindeer, a Christmas tree and a gingerbread man. You type a name, the file is ready a few seconds later, and they're free.

Why a name ornament is a good print to give away

It's small, it's cheap in filament, and it's personal in a way a bought bauble never is. A kid finds their own name on the tree and that's it, you've won Christmas. It also works as a gift tag: hang it on the present instead of a paper label and it stays on the tree afterwards.

The catch with names is that they're all different lengths. "Mia" and "Maximilian" don't fit the same box, and that's where most ready-made STLs fall apart. You either get a giant three-letter name or a long one squeezed into a hairline. The generators fit the text to the shape for you. A long name gets smaller in 5% steps until it keeps a 1 mm gap from everything around it, so it never runs into the nose, the star or the buttons.

Three shapes, one way of printing

The reindeer ornament has the name on a little plaque under its chin, so the face stays free for the eyes and the big red nose. You can pick the eye style (dots, ovals, happy arcs, a wink and a few more), make the nose flat or domed like a drop, put a bow by the ear or leave it off for a more "dad" version, and flip the plaque between light and dark.

The Christmas tree ornament has a star on top with the hanging hole in it, the name across the middle and the year above the trunk. The tiers have small notches by default; if you prefer a clean triangle, there's a smooth version. The baubles are little half domes standing out of the print, and you can switch them off.

The gingerbread man carries the name along his arms, with buttons and icing stripes on the arms and legs. The icing can be a fourth colour or merged into another one if you'd rather not swap that often.

All three default to 80 mm tall, which I find is the size that still reads from a step back without looking like a door sign. You can go from about 60 to 120 mm. The year is optional, and the hole for the ribbon is adjustable, so a thick ribbon or a metal hook both go through.

How the colours are stacked

This is the part I spent the most time on. The ornament is 3 mm thick and built in three bands, all at 0.2 mm layers:

• the body, 1.6 mm, all in the outline colour - no filament change at all for the first eight layers;
• the colour layer, 0.8 mm on top - the face, the green tree or the cookie, with the outline running flush around it;
• the name and the raised details, another 0.6 mm above that.

Keeping the colours in the top layers means less purge, fewer swaps and a back side that's one clean colour. Four layers of the colour band are enough to hide the brown underneath, even with a light filament like the reindeer's cream.

The honest catch

The colour layer has two filaments side by side - the fill and the outline around it. With an AMS or any multi-material setup that's no problem, the slicer handles it from the 3MF. On a single-nozzle printer without one, you can't do that part with a manual swap.

What does work: put the body and the colour layer on the same filament in the slicer and add one pause at 2.4 mm, where the name starts. You lose the outline and the nose comes out in the same colour as the name, but you still get a two-tone ornament with a name that stands out, and you only touch the printer once.

And watch the letter size on long names. Below about 5 mm the strokes get thinner than two lines of a 0.4 mm nozzle, and that's what fails first on a print this small - the reindeer editor warns you about it, on the other two just make the ornament a bit taller. That's also why the editors only offer bold, rounded fonts.

Where to find them

This is exactly the kind of job I built Moxie3D for: same model, different text, many times over. Open the reindeer, the tree or the gingerbread man, type a name, check the preview and download the STL or the 3MF with the colours already assigned. The three ornaments are free.

If you're printing for a whole family, start with the longest name. If that one fits, the rest will too.