Designing a 3D printable "tentacle" vase with SelfCad
Hello hello, fellow steemians.
Today, I'm bringing you a design tutorial using the popular SelfCAD online 3D design tool.
The idea
After walking around Andorra La Vella yesterday, I came upon a realtively well hidden building courtyard that had several sculptures in it:
These sculptures reminded me that there was currently a competition going on over on MyMiniFactory, organized by SelfCAD.
Given the competition has 3 themes (Character, Architectural/interior or an Engineering design) for objects designed using the SelfCAD tool, I decided to start out with an Interior design.
Starter shape
To start the design, I looked at the available shape generators:
I was hesitating a bit betwen the Custom Shape Generator, and trying to use the "Spiral" generator to make something interesting.
After playing a bit with the Shape Generator
I realized this really didn't have the oomph I was looking for...
So, I returned to the Spiral generator:
After tweaking the overall appearance of the spiral, I already had a vision for what I wanted to do with it !
So, I went off to use one of the coolest tools selfCAD has, the Copy Offset tool !
This tool has options for creating a number of copies, differentiating them from the original by moving, rotating, pivoting, scaling... the copies in relation to the original. lots of possibilities in there.
I kept it pretty simple, using the Pivot tool to create several copies
After adjusting the copy number so that the majority of the future model would be watertight, I used the Stitch and Scoop tool to fuse together the copies into a single solid model:
After that, I played with some experimental versions...
But I ultimately ended up deciding on cutting off the bottom ends, filling it up with a cylinder, then creating two separate versions:
Then I made the variants, by cutting the top of one of the two copies:
And voila, we've got the Swirling Cup, and Swirling Vase :
Here's the model on MyMiniFactory
Note: I'll update this post with printed versions as soon as I'm back home with my printer, in about a week's time (~ Friday the 29th)
As always, all pictures in this post (except the sculptures, whose author plaques are visible in the pictures themselves) and the 3D model itself are released under CC | Attribution | Share Alike 4.0
Pretty cool but I have to say I was hoping for more tentacles when I read the title :) I think I was picturing something more Cthulhu-ian . Cool to see the design process and some of the capabilities of the software though.
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