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

Resizing the model


While sculpting the sun face, there was very little effort made to make the model conform to a particular size. However, this is an important consideration when building the model for 3D printing because of tolerance considerations, which will be covered in more detail later.

How big should it be?

Every 3D printer has a range of print areas that it can handle. Naturally, if designing for a particular 3D printer, this should be taken into account.

For this project, the model is going to be sized so that it will be too big for any printer to print. The smallest popular 3D printer on the market has a print bed of 120 mm squared, or about 4" on each side, so that one will be what this model will be resized for.

Scaling with properties

At the end of the previous chapter, the sculpted face was left in Object Mode. Before continuing, make sure that the project is still in Object Mode, or some later steps may get confusing.

Follow these steps to scale the model:

  1. In the Properties panel...