I've been working on a way to use the strengths of 3D printing while

I’ve been working on a way to use the strengths of 3D printing while reducing the rather unpolished look of surfaces. What do you think of me 1st attempt?
The part is printed with a ridged surface paterns and this was then painted and rubbed so paint sits in the groves while exposing the plastic ridges. The paint effect took 2 minutes to do. The part has the patern both sides but printing it like that caused some problems so I split it in 2 halves and glued it. On this the edge will be getting covered in felt.

Hide the surface features you don’t like in surface features you do like. Nice!

Looks awesome! Good job

Great Job, @Michael_Scholtz - what tools did you use to bring on the pattern?

The design was done in freecad and the cutouts where done in the design. I created a negative that was cut out of the design.

You could do some interesting things with moire using this idea, kind of like this- https://www.behance.net/gallery/12324331/Animals-in-Moir

The effect can be done fairly easily in Illustrator by creating a blend between two lines, using steps rather than a gradient. It’s possible that Inkscape has a similar function but I haven’t looked into it. You could import those vectors into CAD and work with them from there rather than drawing them all by hand.

edit- Have a look at Interpolate in Inkscape