It’d been a long time since I built a new creature model, I decided to do one to keep my skills sharp. Pleased to say that this one worked without any adjustment to the model, my design was flawless. A few details:
The entire thing is friction fit and entirely made on the Glowforge, no 3d printed parts or glue.
The entire model comes out to about 11" diameter.
The model is made of 120 faces and 300 connectors
About 2.75 full GF-bed-sized sheets of plywood were harmed during the making of this project.
The build took a little more than two hours – the fit was quite tight.
It’s always fun to look at them from different angles, you start to see different symmetries.
The entire construction is two concentric shapes, separated by custom connectors. You can get a sense of it by looking at the partially complete build-in-progress here:
I just looked at some of your other “creatures”, and they’re all really impressive. I love how you introduce curves into some of them. I always have a hard time getting my head around 3-D designs.
Cheat! Use stella4d to get your angles correct. I import it into Sketchup to model it at material thickness and get the shapes all correct with any model that has concave parts (like this one) but if you pick a model that is one of the platonic solids or otherwise a “shperoid” with no indents, you don’t need to worry about the faces colliding with each other and you can just go with the shapes as is.
I should adapt my process to Fusion360… I am trying to get better at it, and Sketchup doesn’t have a free option anymore so I am using a really outdated version.
Maybe that’s what I’ll do for my next one.
Stella:
Hat tip to @pubultrastar who told me to really dig into Stella. I had tried the demo at the time and was like “eh”… but he showed me there’s more to it and now it’s a great way to explore shapes.
To give you an idea of where I started, this is the shape in Stella:
I hated the Fusion360 interface when I first started. Coming from apps like the Adobe suite, it was a painful transition. Now, after years of usage, I really like it. My process for creating polyhedrals is so much more streamlined than what it once was. I prototype other 3D stuff too, and love creating custom organizer bins for the Gridfinity platform with Fusion. Slicer is also handy for creating laser friendly files for use on the glowforge.
