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

Setting up sculpt


When entering sculpt mode for the first time, it's worth knowing the settings available to you and becoming acquainted with a few commonly changed defaults:

  1. In the menu bar at the bottom of the 3D View panel, click on the Object Mode dropdown and select Sculpt Mode.

  2. Once you enter Sculpt Mode, the tool shelf to the left of the 3D View panel will change. In the Tools tab, there are a number of sections. The most common settings are in the Brush, Symmetry/Lock, and Dyntopo sections. Like most things in Blender, these can be customized and rearranged, so it might be desirable to change the order of these sections to move them to the top.

    The Dyntopo, or dynamic topology, section has settings related to a relatively new feature for sculpting in Blender. Dynamic topology will increase or decrease the complexity of the model in whatever local area needs it in order to make the details we want to add. In other words, if we want a lot of detail on the top of the model where we'll...