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)

Controlling transformations


By default, operators in Blender operate on a 2D plane tangential to the view. This is a fancy way of saying that without any additional controls, it can be hard to predict how a movement or rotation operation will work. For instance, moving something in a random view can include moving up and down more than expected. This effect won't be clear until the view is changed and the transformation is inspected from a different angle, as shown here:

If you can't predict how operations will work, it can be hard to make the things you want. So it is very important to be able to control transformations.

There are two main ways of controlling operators: controlling the view and axis locking.

Controlling the view

The first way to control the operation is by controlling the view. By default, operators depend on the view, so by controlling the view, you can control the action. For instance, an object, when added to a scene, is exactly halfway through the grid plane of the world...