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)

Adding a face


Functionally, the design is complete, but as the old saying goes, it's all in the details. This little octopus would be much cuter with a face. Here's how you give it one:

  1. Make sure Edit mode is off (Tab) and that the 3D cursor is at the origin (Shift + C).

  2. Create a circle (Shift + A) by navigating to Mesh | Circle:

  3. Again, the newly created circle is hidden inside the octopus, so with the circle still selected, switch to Local view (Numpad /).

    Since this circle will become the face, it's good to name it Face now, using the same steps for naming objects from before.

  4. A circle in Blender is a flat object that is just a ring of points with no face. But that's easy enough to fix:

  5. Switch to Edit mode (Tab).

  6. With all the points or edges selected (A) from the 3D View menu, navigate to Mesh | Faces | Make Edge/Face, or press F on the keyboard:

    The Make Edge/Face command attempts to make a connected face from the selected vertices or lines. It can be quite intelligent, but if the points are...