Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Octopus Pencil Holder

By : Joe Larson
Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Octopus Pencil Holder

By: Joe Larson

Overview of this book

This book will cover the very basic but essential techniques you need to model an organic and functional object for 3D printing using Blender. Starting with pen and paper and then moving on to the computer, you will create your first project in Blender, add basic geometric shapes, and use techniques such as extruding and subdividing to transform these shapes into complex meshes. You will learn how modifiers can automatically refine the shape further and combine multiple shapes into a single 3D printable model. By the end of the book, you will have gained enough practical hands-on experience to be able to create a 3D printable object of your choice, which in this case is a 3D print-ready octopus pencil holder.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

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...