Interactive Demo: A 49-Layer LPBF Build, Replayed in Your Browser

The part below is a gear produced by laser powder bed fusion — 49 layers at a 0.04 mm layer thickness, on an 8 × 8 mm build plate. Press play to watch it deposit, and drag at any point to orbit the part mid-build.

The powder has been filtered out of this view. In the machine, every layer begins as a bed of loose powder spread across the whole plate, and the laser consolidates only the cross-section belonging to the part. What is drawn here is that consolidated material alone, which is why the gear appears to rise from a bare plate rather than out of a powder bed.

Geometry is the easy half. The solve behind a build like this resolves the temperature field over the full part at 20 µm resolution — the whole component at powder-scale detail, not a representative cube standing in for it. This view shows the deposited geometry; the thermal field is not drawn here.