3D printing or additive manufacturing is a process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital file. It is made by laying down many successive thin layers of a material.
3D printable models may be created with a computer aided design (CAD) package, via a 3D scanner or by a plain digital camera and photogrammetry software. 3D printed models created with CAD results in reduced errors and can be corrected before printing, allowing verification in the design of the object before it is printed.
The manual modeling process of preparing geometric data for 3D computer graphics is similar to plastic arts such as sculpting. 3D scanning is a process of collecting digital data on the shape and appearance of a real object, creating a digital model based on it.