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)

Adding a pencil cup


The octopus model so far is appealing, but it can also be made functional. The plan for this project was a cup holder, so it needs to have the shape changed so that pencils can be put inside it.

  1. To start, temporarily turn off the Subdivision Surface modifier by locating the Subsurf modifier in the Modifiers tab and clicking on the eye icon for it. Now the simplified geometry is easier to work with:

  2. Go to Face Select (Ctrl + Tab) mode in Edit mode (Tab). Now, select the topmost face of the octopus:

  3. Switch to Wireframe (Z) and front Ortho view (Numpad 1) and Extrude (E) the top face down into the body. Stop just a little above the red X axis line:

    Note

    It may be necessary to scale (S) the bottom of the cup a little so that it fits inside the body.

  4. Now the shape is generally right for a pencil holder. Turn the Subdivision Surface modifier back on by clicking on its eye icon in the Modifiers tab. You'll notice that the cup bottom is a bit too round to be a space-efficient cup:

  5. In...