How does 3D Printing work?

3D printing, or Additive Manufacturing, is the process of building an object layer by layer. The printerwill deposit material in very thin layers to eventually create an object. To do this a 3D object in the form of an STL file is loaded into "slicing" software. The software takes thes objects and breaks it down into many thin layers and saves it to a GCODE file. GCODE is the language that tells the 3D printer the X, Y, & Z directions to move the print head while extruding or depositing material. There is much more invovled in what GCODE actually does. There is also many types of 3D printing technology, (FDM, DLP, SLA, etc.), but this is a basic explanation.