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

Building a puzzle piece


Now, let's build a basic puzzle piece that can be used to turn the sun into a puzzle.

Building the basic shape

Let's get started with the basic shape of a puzzle piece:

  1. On the menu at the bottom of the 3D View, locate the layers pane, which looks like an array of connected boxes. Each box is a separate layer.

  2. Click on an empty layer:

The sun will disappear, but that's simply because it's on another layer, the one with the orange dot in it. Organizing objects in different layers in Blender is a great way to ensure that things don't quickly get out of hand and to ensure that there is no need to hide or unhide individual objects. In addition, multiple layers can be viewed at once if desired, so you can work on related objects. For now, we'll use this empty layer to start building our puzzle object:

  1. Add (Shift + A) a Grid object:

  2. Under the Tool Shelf to the left of the 3D View are the properties of the new Grid. Before clicking on anything else, change the X Subdivisions and...