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

Extra credit


In this project, modifiers were used on simple objects right up to the final object. This allowed the creation of a more complex object while retaining the editability of the simpler objects. However, leaving modifiers unapplied becomes undesirable when objects become too complex. Having to rebuild an object every time an edit is made can crash a computer.

For fun, try to see how quickly Blender will slow down, and maybe try to crash it, by making several cubes and adding a Subsurf modifier to increase their polygon count. Then Boolean the smoothed cubes together, but don't apply the Boolean modifiers. Add more and more Subsurfed cubes and add them to the Boolean object. Then start moving around and editing the cubes to see when performance becomes choppy. It may be surprising how little it takes, depending on your system:

Also, with the measurements of an SD card available, any object can be turned into an SD card holder. Why not make an SD holder key chain or an SD holder that...