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 an SD card holder


Now it's time to mount an SD card holder on the ring. The first step is to make a virtual SD card in Blender.

Organizing by layers

When working on a project with multiple parts in Blender, it's possible to organize things by using layers. While the idea of layers may not make as much sense in 3D as in a 2D graphics editor, the idea is similar. Shapes in different layers may share the same space, and they can be looked at and edited separately and independently. Layers are found in the menu at the bottom of the 3D View, as shown here:

By default, the ring was created in the first layer, and there is a dot in the first layer to indicate that there is an object in it. To switch to an Empty layer, simply click on a square on the layer icons at the bottom of the 3D View or type a number from the top row of the keyboard.

The number keys across the top of the keyboard (unless you're emulating the number pad) from 1 to 0 will switch to the corresponding layer in the top row...