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

Creating the base object


Since the editing tools can only work on existing objects, the first thing to do is create a new object:

  1. Start Blender and select all objects (A) and delete them (X).

  2. Then, add an icosphere (Shift + A) through Mesh | IcoSphere.

Icospheres differ from normal spheres in that they don't bunch up at the poles. This will work out better for sculpting. But if viewed from the top (Numpad 7), the icosphere is not symmetrical from left to right. To fix this, follow these steps:

  1. Rotate (R) the icosphere 90 degrees along the Y axis (Y).

  2. To make the icosphere into a disk, scale it (S), constraining to the X and Y axes (Shift + Z), to about a factor of 5.

  3. When the disk is the right shape, apply (Ctrl + A) Rotation & Scale.

Tip

Applying rotation and scale doesn't have any visible effect on the model, but it will affect other things, particularly those related to the sculpt tools. Before applying rotation and scale, the object you see was actually another object modified with rotation...