3D Modeling (11-1)

Yina and I worked together on this project.  After playing with Tinkercad for a bit and figuring out how it worked we decided to find a design on Thingiverse to print.  We wanted to make something small and functional.  We ended up finding this great dinosaur skull hook design.  I asked one of my coworkers to print the design for me on one of our fancy 3D printers.  The printer prints support material alongside the ABS plastic, so you can print more intricate designs as long as you're willing to chip away the support material afterwards.

Yina and I then met again to work on something new together, since the dinosaur design was just something we pulled from Thingiverse.  We also wanted to try printing something on the school's printers.  We decided we would make rings since they were also small and functional and would be easy to design in Tinkercad.  We played around with a bunch of different shapes and techniques and made some really funky rings, but unfortunately they were too funky for the Makerbot.  Even with supports and rafts added, the printer kept malfunctioning when we tried to print the rings.  We did get some interesting raft remnants though.  Yina and I then deleted the more complicated rings from our design.  We will go again tomorrow and try to print just the simpler rings.  Hopefully we can get it done before class!

Since teaching myself 3D modeling was a personal learning objective, I decided to spend a little extra time over Thanksgiving break teaching myself some more complicated techniques.  I downloaded Blender, a very powerful and free 3D modeling program, and I watched a few tutorials on Lynda.  I took what I learned in the tutorials and began experimenting to create my own forms from scratch.  I created the first figure by starting with a rectangle and subdividing and extruding faces.  The dancing lady in the background of the first figure was just a test of a different idea that I didn't end up following through on.  The second figure I created by starting with a sphere.  Once I had the basic shape of the face in place I refined it a bit with the sculpting tools.  I sent the first figure to Shapeways to get printed in ceramic, which was surprisingly cheaper than plastic.  The second figure I asked my coworker to print at work again.  I'm probably not going to get away with doing that any more, but it was worth it for these two small models, and I'm really happy with the way the head looks!  I haven't gotten the ceramic figure from Shapeways yet, but I'm excited to see how he turns out!