Christmas Name Ornament

A flat, 79 mm Christmas ball ornament with a name across it, up to four snowflakes, and an optional second line of text, made in OpenSCAD. Every part can be exported on its own for printing in two or more colours.

A long name is scaled down to fit inside the ball, and the presets export in one batch with scadbatch.

The default ornament: "Lyle" over a red background, with four snowflakes

Use it

Open src/ChristmasNameOrnament.scad in OpenSCAD and set the parameters in the Customizer panel:

Name and font, the font size, and whether there is a line under the name.
Snowflakes: one of six designs, or none, in each of four places.
Background thickness: the red disc behind the details. Zero leaves it out.
Second line of text, such as a year. You’ll usually have to move it with its X and Y offsets.
Part: the ball outline, the name, the second line, the snowflakes, the background, or everything.

The Customizer also lists the five example presets in src/ChristmasNameOrnament.json, which OpenSCAD loads because it has the same name as the .scad file.

Long names

A name wider than name_max_width (70 mm by default) is scaled down to that width, keeping its proportions. At the default size of 15, “Christopher” in Liberation Sans is 106 mm wide and would hang outside the ball; here it’s scaled to 70 mm:

The ornament with "Christopher" fitted inside the ball

Set name_max_width to 0 to leave the name at full size. Fitting needs an OpenSCAD version with textmetrics(). OpenSCAD 2021.01 doesn’t have it: there it warns Ignoring unknown function 'textmetrics' and leaves the name at full size.

Fonts

The font list offers Arial Black and Arial Bold Italic, and seven Google Fonts: Berkshire Swash, Courgette, Sriracha, Yellowtail, Tangerine, Parisienne and Italianno. Choose “other” to name any installed font, in the form Nunito Sans:style=Bold Italic. Help > Font List in OpenSCAD shows what’s installed. Restart OpenSCAD after installing a font.

If a font isn’t installed, OpenSCAD uses another one without a warning. Check the preview before exporting.

Several colours

Export each part (outline, name, second line, snowflakes, background) as its own STL, load them together in the slicer, and give each a filament or an extruder. With one nozzle, print the background in one colour and change filament for the rest. A small cylinder placed in the slicer gives the nozzle somewhere to prime after the change.

If there’s no background, or no second line, exporting that part gives a 0.01 mm placeholder instead of an empty file. It sits inside the ring.

Batch export

scadbatch exports every preset in one run:

scadbatch export src/ChristmasNameOrnament.scad src/ChristmasNameOrnament.json out/

Add your own names as presets in the JSON, or save them from the Customizer.

Printing

The ornament prints flat. At the defaults it’s 2 mm thick: a 0.4 mm background and 1.6 mm details.
In Cura, Skin Expand Distance keeps the top layers of thin details continuous; other slicers have an equivalent setting.
To print a different size, scale it in the slicer.

Known limits

With no background, the ring and the underline hold everything together. The underline stays on when there’s no background, whatever line_under_name says. Each snowflake reaches the ring from every position. The dot of an i or a j doesn’t reach anything, so it prints as a loose piece: “Liam” in Liberation Sans comes out as two pieces.
The second line is placed by hand. Nothing keeps it inside the ball or off the snowflakes.

Checks

just test takes about 4 s. For 17 cases and the 5 presets, it renders the ornament with warnings treated as errors, then checks how many separate solids it has and its size. The cases cover each part, a long name with and without fitting, and no background with each snowflake in every position. They use Liberation Sans, which has to be installed (fonts-liberation on Debian), and were written against OpenSCAD 2026.10.15.

just images renders the two pictures in this README.

Origin and licence

The ornament is a rewrite, under MIT, of an idea from Lyl3’s Christmas Name Ornament on Thingiverse: a name across a flat ball ornament, with snowflakes. The code, the ball outline and the six snowflakes, drawn by one generator, are new; the parameters and presets keep their names, so saved presets still load. The earlier CC BY-SA 3.0 versions are in this repository’s history. MIT; see LICENSE.