An email went out on a mailing list here at Wolfram looking for someone interested in learning about doing 3D printing. I’d heard about these so-called “Santa Claus machines,” but had never seen one in action. They’re really quite interesting. You tell Santa what you want, and out it comes---a shiny new toy! Now it’s not quite that simple, but you get the idea. The models that these printers create can’t be too delicate, or they’ll break. The kind of printer that I’m now most familiar with builds the model from the bottom up, constructing the object one layer at a time from plaster and water. A thin layer of plaster is deposited, then a binding agent sprays from basically an oversized ink-jet printer to harden the areas that form the object. Once the printer is done, you have to dust off the object and infuse it with a hardener so it’s less fragile. But back to the story. Ed Pegg Jr---associate editor for MathWorld---was writing an article about 3D printing and wanted to know more about the process. The idea was to print a physical 3D model of the Spikey, our company logo, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is just a few blocks from our offices. (You can read about the development of the Spikey here.) This was the version we were working with: But how would we turn that image into something we could actually hold in our hands?