Build Plate Capacity Calculator
Planning a batch? Find out how many copies of a part fit on your printer bed at once. Enter the bed and part sizes with the spacing you like, and the calculator grids them out — trying both orientations to squeeze in the most.
Presets are nominal — check your printer's real printable area, which is often a few millimetres smaller than the bed.
Formula & how it works
Along each axis the usable length is bed − 2 × margin. The number of parts that fit is floor((usable + gap) ÷ (part + gap)), since parts need a gap between them but not after the last one.
Total is columns × rows. With rotation allowed, both part orientations are tried and the larger total is kept.
Worked example
On a 220 × 220 mm Ender 3 bed, a 20 × 20 mm part with a 3 mm gap and 5 mm edge margin gives a usable 210 mm per side. That fits floor((210 + 3) ÷ 23) = 9 parts per row, so 9 × 9 = 81 parts, using about 67% of the bed area.
Batching prints efficiently
Spacing is a trade-off
Tighter spacing fits more parts but leaves less room for cooling and can make parts harder to pop off, especially tall ones that need airflow. Wider spacing is safer for quality but costs you plate space. Start with a few millimetres and adjust once you see how your parts release.
Let rotation do the work
Rectangular parts often pack very differently once turned 90 degrees, and it is easy to miss the better layout by eye. Leaving rotation enabled means the calculator always reports the higher of the two orientations, which is usually what your slicer's auto-arrange will settle on too.
Mind the real printable area
The number printed on a bed is rarely the full area you can print on — clips, an exclusion zone, or a nozzle-reach limit can shave off several millimetres. If a batch comes out one row short of the estimate, trim the bed dimensions here to the true printable size and recompute.