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

Adding a face


Functionally, the design is complete, but as the old saying goes, it's all in the details. This little octopus would be much cuter with a face. Here's how you give it one:

  1. Make sure Edit mode is off (Tab) and that the 3D cursor is at the origin (Shift + C).

  2. Create a circle (Shift + A) by navigating to Mesh | Circle:

  3. Again, the newly created circle is hidden inside the octopus, so with the circle still selected, switch to Local view (Numpad /).

    Since this circle will become the face, it's good to name it Face now, using the same steps for naming objects from before.

  4. A circle in Blender is a flat object that is just a ring of points with no face. But that's easy enough to fix:

  5. Switch to Edit mode (Tab).

  6. With all the points or edges selected (A) from the 3D View menu, navigate to Mesh | Faces | Make Edge/Face, or press F on the keyboard:

    The Make Edge/Face command attempts to make a connected face from the selected vertices or lines. It can be quite intelligent, but if the points are...