Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Fun and Functional Projects

By : Joe Larson
Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Fun and Functional Projects

By: Joe Larson

Overview of this book

3D printing has revolutionized the way that global industries conceptualize and design products for mass consumption. Considered as the next “trillion-dollar” business, every industry is in the race to equip its personnel with techniques to prototype and simplify complex manufacturing process. This book will take you through some simple to complex and effective principles of designing 3D printed objects using Blender. There is a comprehensive coverage of projects such as a 3D print-ready octopus pencil holder, which will teach you how to add basic geometric shapes, and use techniques such as extruding and subdividing to transform these shapes into complex meshes. Furthermore, you’ll learn to use various techniques to derive measurements for an object, model these objects using Blender, organize the parts into layers, and later combine them to create the desired object with the help of a 3D printable SD card holder ring design project. The final project will help you master the techniques of designing simple to complex puzzles models for 3D printing. Through the course of the book, we'll explore various robust sculpting methods supported by Blender to create objects. You’ll move, rotate, and scale the object, and manipulate the view. You’ll edit objects with actions such as bends or curves, similar to drawing or building up a clay structure of different shapes and sizes. By the end of the book, you will have gained thorough practical hands-on experience to be able to create a real-world 3D printable object of your choice.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
3D Printing Designs: Fun and Functional Projects
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The first basic shape


This project is going to take advantage of several powerful editing tools that Bender provides. The first one is going to be the extrude operator. Extruding takes its name from a process for making things in real life, but in 3D modelling, extruding takes a selected part of an existing model and creates new geometry on the edge of the selected parts, so that the original can be moved away but remain attached to where it came from. The result is a new shape that can then be edited.

Let's get ready; it's time to get to work:

  1. Open Blender, select all (A) in the default scene, and clear (X) it:

  2. Next, add (Shift + A) a cylinder object to the scene:

  3. In the Tool Shelf, open the parameters for Add Cylinder and change the number of Vertices from 32 to 8. Change the Radius field to 25 and the depth to 15:

    Note

    Remember that these settings are only available when an object is first created. Selecting anything else, performing a transformation or action, or even deselecting the object...