Saving Print Time and Filament when making Trays

I love 3D printing, but I find myself using it to basically make two categories of things: game pieces or storage solutions (which naturally includes storage solutions for game pieces!).  Today I want to talk a about how I make those storage solutions, because it's evolved a bit over time.

When I'm making a tray for some kind of storage solution (like the aforementioned mini storage tray), I always try to punch a bunch of holes into the flat pieces, like the bottom.  I figure that there's no need to waste the time and plastic printing a solid sheet, so I make some simple geometric shapes and use them to make a bunch of holes and save a bunch of plastic.  Well, I definitely accomplish one of those goals, but the other one not so much.

Let's look at just the base of my mini storage solution.  Here's the base with all of the cutouts, as I made it:

It's a fairly large tray that's going to use about 11 meters of plastic and take about 8 hours to print (at .1 mm layers, which is way more detail than this would need).

Check out how it looks without the cutouts:

Unsurprisingly, it uses a lot more filament (over 21 meters)... but it'll only take about 6 hours to print.  In hindsight, that makes perfect sense, as those big long straight lines of plastic can allow the print head to get up to full speed and then lay out a lot of plastic at that speed, instead of constantly needing to stop to deal with a cutout.  Still, I found the difference interesting, and it got me thinking about other methods.  So, as a proof of concept, I made this:

It only uses 6 meters of filament and 7 hours to print.

Instead of cutting out a bunch of rectangles from a big sheet, I made this by a fundamentally different strategy.  Those first two images were made by a flat plane with the Solidify modifier on it, making it 1.5 mm thick.  Then, I put the various cutouts on it and used the Boolean Difference modifier to punch the holes.  The last image is different

I subdivided my plane a bunch of times so that it had all of those rectangular faces.  Then, I selected the whole thing and pressed x then selected only faces to delete all of the faces but leave all of the vertices and edges in place (leaving me with a lattice).  Then, I put the Skin modifier on it and adjusted the Radius X and Radius Y vertex data to .75 so that I'd have my original 1.5 mm thick base (I also moved it down .75 mm on the Z axis so that it would line up with the original parts).

I like this technique because it's easier than calculating out all of the cutout arrays.  Also, if you don't want a simple grid, it's really easy to delete individual edges and draw new ones (select two vertices and press f to connect them).  That lets you make silly things like this:

What got me thinking about this is that my mom got me a copy of Terraforming Mars for christmas.  My wife and I had a great time playing it, but the cubes slid all over the place on the player boards.  I know that there's a ton of player boards already on Thingiverse... but I think I want to do my own thing.  So, I'll use this technique on those trays and will hopefully save some plastic and some effort during the design process!