Conventional wisdom says that it’s impossible to print 90-degree overhangs without a supporting base. You may have even tried it yourself at home to disastrous effect. That has certainly been the case up until now.

FullControl challenges this notion. A free, open-source software for additive manufacturing created by Andy Gleadall, a lecturer at Loughborough University in the UK, FullControl’s overhang challenge is one of the latest recently-released models added to the program’s web-app model library.

Using this model, you can print overhangs out of thin air. A video posted on Reddit shows the way this design can be used to print overhangs without a supporting base. It’s an interesting piece of G-code engineering, although it’s also clear that this particular print’s purpose is not functional. Rather, you would print it just for itself as a technical feat.

The video does not show clearly that this mind-bending print is created without a 3D model. FullControl works exclusively as a parametric design app, with configurable toggles and values to visualize the toolpath and generate the G-code directly. No STLs, no slicing involved.

While the frontend of the program currently is Excel (you can download some samples of the project from the FullControl repo on GitHub,) and you can play with preconfigured web-browser-based models on the FullControl website, the open source files for the program (written in Python) are said to be coming soon.