Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Octopus Pencil Holder

By : Joe Larson
Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Octopus Pencil Holder

By: Joe Larson

Overview of this book

This book will cover the very basic but essential techniques you need to model an organic and functional object for 3D printing using Blender. Starting with pen and paper and then moving on to the computer, you will create your first project in Blender, add basic geometric shapes, and use techniques such as extruding and subdividing to transform these shapes into complex meshes. You will learn how modifiers can automatically refine the shape further and combine multiple shapes into a single 3D printable model. By the end of the book, you will have gained enough practical hands-on experience to be able to create a 3D printable object of your choice, which in this case is a 3D print-ready octopus pencil holder.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

The best settings


Blender has a reputation for being difficult and unintuitive to use. This is true for the default settings. However, Blender is also very easily adjustable with a few settings and can be made much easier to use. How you set up your instance of Blender will depend on what your setup is like.

To access the settings, in the top menu select File | User Preferences. In the Blender User Preferences panel that comes up, select the Input tab button:

A scroll-wheel mouse and number pad

The recommended setup for Blender is to use your keyboard and a mouse with a scroll wheel. In this case, there is only one setting that is recommended to be changed from the default:

  1. Click on the button that says Left under the words Select With.

  2. Click on the button that says Save User Settings:

Changing this one setting will make Blender much more intuitive to use.

Because the default is for the right mouse button to be the select button, and some may prefer to keep this default, this book will refer to...