I’ve not had much luck with using the AI tooling to create 3D models of anything but the simplest objects in the past. The newer models have gotten a lot more capable.

A month ago my daughter fed the dog right after I did. I wasn’t home; I opened Claude on my phone and described a simple “print in place” sliding board with positions labeled for “breakfast”, “dinner” and “midnight snack”, asking for a model I could 3D print. It did a great job!

I’ve since given Claude Desktop a few other jobs including more complex things with parametrics, hinges, and more and it’s been hitting them out of the park.

So I decided to try the pelican-bench as a physical object, a coaster:

The finished 3D-printed coaster showing a pelican riding a red bicycle against a blue sky.

Here it is in the slicing software:

A model of a round coaster showing a pelican riding a bicycle, displayed on a slicer’s build plate.

Details

For this one I used Gemini 4 Argon in the web interface. It gave me a Python program that generated the scad file and then ran OpenSCAD. My previous Claude web prompt, and another Gemini web prompt gave me zip files with “.3mf” and “.stl” files in it so I’m not sure what caused this one not to.

I believe Simon tends towards a minimal prompt, but here’s what I went with:

I have a Bambu Labs H3C printer that can do up to 9 different colors. However,
one of the print heads is only for TPU, so let's stick to 8 different
colors. I have a bunch of the Bambu filament colors of Basic PLA. Please make
a 3d printable multi-filament coaster that has a pelican riding a bicycle on
it. Note I only have 0.4mm nozzles, so we can't do really fine detail. Let's
make it a slightly oversized coaster, just to give us a bit more room for
the design. Please make a 3d printable file.

The first stab at it generated some slicer errors when I imported it:

Error: 22 non-manifold edges.
Error: reversed faces detected

I gave Gemini a screen capture of this image, and the result of what is what you see printed above.

Conclusion

I’m an ok 3D modeler. Simple things I can do pretty easy, but more complicated things tend to add a lot of time, either with me fumbling with Fusion or me having to look up tutorial videos to learn or remember how to do things. The dog feeder board for example likely would have taken a couple hours because I don’t do multi-color modeling much.

AI was able to (given the dimensions and a photo of my “kitchen junk drawer” make a set of organizers that fix exactly to the drawer, and has turned a disaster into, well, much less of a disaster.

3D AI Pelican