I 3D Printed My Most Viewed Blender Tutorial on a Bambu Lab H2C

Written By Kevin Ramirez

This is one of my favorite 3D prints I've ever made. It's a bakery planter — and it glows. This was inspired by a Grease Pencil tutorial I made about 4 years ago that became my most viewed video on the channel. Bambu Lab sent me their new H2C printer and I thought it was a great opportunity to take the bakery from the digital world and make it real.

When I decided to do this I hadn't done anything this involved before. I started 3D printing about a year and a half ago and most of my designs have been decorative or simple functional items. But the H2C is built for multicolor workflows and I wanted to push what I could do — from both a technical and creative standpoint. It was a huge learning experience. But I really loved how it turned out.

The Original Bakery

The original bakery has a cozy toon style — corner building, two stories, red and white striped awnings, flower boxes on every window, oval dormers up top, and a cupcake sign hanging out front. The whole thing was drawn in Blender using Grease Pencil, which is a tool that lets you draw and animate directly in 3D space. So although it looks 2D, it actually exists in three dimensions. That tutorial ended up hitting over a million views. I really loved that design and thought it would be a fun challenge to bring it from screen to the physical world.

The Idea

When the H2C arrived I was intimidated by how large it was but also excited about all the possibilities. I've been using Bambu printers since I started 3D printing — started with a P1S which is a fantastic printer. My focus has always been on the creative side of 3D printing. I don't really use CAD — Blender is my main program and it was going to be my main program here too.

Because I already had the building in 3D, I could use that as a jumping off point. Most of the structure I could rebuild with hard surface modeling, but there were a lot of hand drawn details I wanted to retain. Grease Pencil strokes exist in 3D space but they technically aren't mesh geometry — you can't print them directly. So this was a great opportunity to use Inkform, my free Blender addon that converts Grease Pencil strokes into printable mesh geometry.

The original plan was to just rebuild the bakery facade as a print. But I thought it would be more interesting as a functional planter — something that Theo could potentially live in. I sized up the top to fit a small pot, which meant sizing up the whole building to keep the proportions right. That left a lot of empty space inside the body, which gave me another idea — to add a light fixture inside so it could double as a lamp. Something I'd never done before. So the idea started as a simple facade print and evolved into a multicolor planter that lights up from the inside.

The H2C uses a system called the Vortek Hotend — six interchangeable contactless hotends that handle up to seven colors simultaneously with little to no purge waste. If you've done multicolor printing before you know purge waste is one of the biggest pain points. For me that was always one of the biggest deterrents to doing anything complicated with multicolor. But here, it was a completely different experience.

The toon outlines are really what make this design feel like the illustration. I considered omitting them — it would have been a lot easier — but without them it just wouldn't have looked right.

The Plan

I wanted to approach this one component at a time. This was essentially my first model kit and I didn't want to overwhelm myself — designing everything digitally, printing it all, and then finding out nothing fit. I needed to design as I went so I could see in real time how everything came together.

I started by thinking through how it was going to be assembled. I needed a skeleton — a hollow structure open at the top to house a light fixture inside, with openings for the windows so the light could shine through, and a small hole at the back for the power cord. The four walls and decorative elements would then glue onto that structure.

For the top I needed a removable roof in case I ever needed access to the light fixture, and a separate section on top to hold the pot. I designed it as a cover pot — meaning the plant sits in its original clear plastic liner and this is just a decorative holder. PLA is non-toxic and handles some moisture fine, but I wanted to avoid any long term breakdown. Keeping the plant separate just made sense.

Modeling

I sized everything around the pot — about 3.6 inches in diameter — and reverse scaled everything else from there using the reference as a guide.

I started with the skeleton first, using booleans to cut holes for the windows. I picked a basic green PLA since it was going to be hidden inside anyway, but that ended up affecting how the light transmitted through the piece. That first print took about 4 to 5 hours.

Testing

Before going further I needed to test a few pieces with outlines — specifically the windows and the awning. I initially tried printing the outlines and awning together but wasn't getting the color separation I wanted. The colors were bleeding together and despite adjusting shell thickness and paint penetration layers, I realized the issue was the thickness of the element itself. The solution was to separate the outlines from the colored pieces entirely — print them independently and manually place the colors inside. More tedious, but the improvement was worth it. I also swapped black outlines for dark brown — it felt softer and matched the illustration better.

For the windows I needed something thin enough to let light through but not flimsy. The light blue filament I had was too dark so I used the layer height painting tool in Bambu Studio to paint the bottom half white and the top half blue to bring the color up a shade. It worked. And at that thinness the edges have a slight gradient — totally unintended but it looked great.

For lighting I was originally going to use tea lights but the output wasn't strong enough. I ended up using a lamp kit from Amazon and it worked perfectly. When I tested the windows on the skeleton I noticed some of the green was shining through. Not a dealbreaker — it actually made the color more interesting — but for future builds I'll go with a more neutral color for the skeleton.

Testing Inkform on the corner pillars first, then the windows, door, and main sign, it came out exactly how I drew it. These were also my first real tests of the H2C's multicolor capability and I was genuinely impressed by how little waste it produced.

One thing to stay on top of is filament mapping. Even if you specify colors in Bambu Studio and auto-group the filaments, they can print out of order depending on orientation — which is exactly what happened with the bakery sign. A good reminder that what you see digitally doesn't always translate the same way physically.

Building It Out

With the tests done I moved onto the rest of the elements. I printed the four walls slightly thicker than the skeleton in beige filament with dark brown details, keeping those hand drawn Inkform elements, then glued them onto the structure.

The awnings and pillars were the most challenging parts. The frames kept snapping at first but with careful handling and constant gluing I got them together. The pillars required a specific modeling approach to separate the faces from the outlines while retaining interior detail.

I printed a detailed base for the bakery to sit on and assembled in order — pillars first, then awnings, which helped position the windows, then the arched sections and the sign.

For the planter boxes I took the same approach as the awnings but they were much less intricate. For the plants I used a Geometry Nodes workaround — placing spheres into a collection, adding a realize instances node, then a remesh modifier to combine them cleanly. Once you're happy with it you can apply the modifiers or hit Ctrl+A and select Visual Geometry to Mesh. After printing and sanding they looked great.

The bakery sign and dormers were where the H2C's multicolor capability really shined. I tried painting portions directly in Bambu Studio and the color accuracy was great with minimal waste. Knowing that workflow is possible would have saved me so much time on past projects.

Finishing Touches

This is my favorite part of any build. Instead of leaving the planters plain I added flowers and lighter green plant pieces in three variations each, placed randomly. My hands aren't the steadiest but the look was worth it. I also added some growth around the corners of the building and it really completed the piece.

The Result

Here it is — the finished bakery next to the original reference. I think it holds up pretty well. This project has really given me the confidence to keep making things I never thought I could make.

I did put Theo in the pot just to try it. He didn't really like it. Didn't match his vibe. He's appreciating it from a distance.

All the resources, links, and products mentioned are linked below. If you have questions about the process or the printer feel free to leave a comment. And if you want to support me, Theo, and the channel you can check out the shop at kevandram.com.

◈ MY 3D PRINTER & TABLET ◈

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Kevin Ramirez is a designer and independent creator based in Los Angeles. He runs Kevandram, a creative studio building an original IP world through 2D/3D art, 3D printing, and new creative technology — documented publicly one project at a time.

Kevin Ramirez
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