Guide
3D emboss and relief printing, and what really decides the height
Textured wallpaper, raised wood grain, relief murals and tactile panel work all come from the same trick: the printer stops making an image and starts building a solid. Understanding how it builds is the difference between buying a machine that does what you saw in the demo and one that does not.
Mechanism
Relief is varnish, stacked
A UV printer cures ink the instant it lands. That is what makes relief possible at all: because a layer is solid before the next one arrives, the carriage can pass over the same area again and lay more material on top of what is already there. Do it enough times and you have physical height rather than a picture of it.
The height is built almost entirely in varnish — the clear channel — sometimes over a white base. Colour goes on last, over the top, so the texture reads as part of the image rather than sitting under a flat print. That is why a machine without a dedicated varnish channel cannot do this work at all, whatever its resolution.
What decides it
Four things, in order of how much they matter
How many varnish channels the machine has
This is the ceiling on everything else. Two varnish channels lay twice the material per pass that one does. A machine configured without varnish cannot emboss at any pass count.
How many passes you are willing to run
Height accumulates per pass, and passes cost time. A deep relief is not a setting — it is a job that takes several times as long as a flat print of the same size. The economics of the job, not the machine, usually set the real limit.
Pin-curing between layers
Each layer has to be cured enough to hold its shape before the next lands, but not so hard that the next will not bond to it. Get this wrong and the stack either slumps or delaminates. It is the part that separates a machine that can do relief from one that can do it repeatably.
The material underneath
A tall stack of varnish on a substrate the ink barely grips will lift at the edges. Adhesion matters more here than on any flat print, because the relief gives the failure somewhere to start.
Adhesion is the one people underestimate — see surface energy and the tape test, and remember the 24-hour rule before you judge any relief sample.
The machine
The 3412UV is built for this
It is specified as a UV printer for 3D effect on wallpaper. It is the machine in the range designed around relief work rather than adapted to it.
- Printheads
- 3–12
- Head
- Ricoh Gen5 / Gen6
- Colours
- CMYK + LcLm + White · CMYK + LcLm + White + Varnish
- Print width
- 3200 mm
- Speed
- 4PASS 24 · 6PASS 16 · 8PASS 12 m²/h
Up to twelve heads and a dedicated varnish channel is what makes deep relief practical rather than theoretical — more varnish per pass means the same height in fewer passes, and passes are the thing you pay for.
What we have achieved
Relief over 5 mm, built in our own testing
We have built relief over 5 mm on these machines. That is our own result from our own testing — not a figure from the specification sheet, which states no emboss height at all, and not a number we are going to attach to the machine as though it were a specification.
The distinction matters, because a height is only meaningful with the conditions attached: how many passes it took, which varnish, on what substrate. Ask us those and we will answer them. Ask any other supplier quoting you a height the same three questions — a number without them is the best result somebody once got, on a job you will not be running.
If depth is the deciding factor in your purchase, say so when you book. We will run your artwork at the relief your product actually needs, on the substrate you intend to sell on, and you can hold the sample — that answers the question better than any figure, ours included.
Next step
See it at the depth you need
Bring the artwork and the material. We will run it at the relief your product needs and you can judge the sample the next morning, once adhesion has actually developed.
Machines are sold in configurations, so the specification decides the price. Tell us the material and the volume and we will quote the exact build.