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 best settings


Blender has a reputation for being difficult and unintuitive to use. This is true for the default settings. However, Blender is also very easily adjustable with a few settings and can be made much easier to use. How you set up your instance of Blender will depend on what your setup is like.

To access the settings, in the top menu select File | User Preferences. In the Blender User Preferences panel that comes up, select the Input tab button:

A scroll-wheel mouse and number pad

The recommended setup for Blender is to use your keyboard and a mouse with a scroll wheel. In this case, there is only one setting that is recommended to be changed from the default:

  1. Click on the button that says Left under the words Select With.

  2. Click on the button that says Save User Settings:

Changing this one setting will make Blender much more intuitive to use.

Because the default is for the right mouse button to be the select button, and some may prefer to keep this default, this book will refer to...