3D Printing Designs: Fun and Functional Projects

Get to grips with 3D printing and learn to model designs using Blender

About This Book

• From the author who brought you the first practical look at 3D printing with 3D Printing Blueprints
• Get a comprehensive coverage of the prototyping techniques you need to know to start printing your own 3D designs
• Rekindle your mathematical genius to design personalized objects for complex puzzles

Who This Book Is For

If you're new to the world of 3D printing, this is the book for you. Some basic knowledge of Blender and geometry would be helpful, but is not necessary.

What You Will Learn

• Get to know about the different types of 3D printers and their limitations
• See how Y, H, and T shapes illustrate different ideas of successful 3D design for home 3D printers
• Set up and configure Blender to model a file for 3D printing
• Understand material characteristics, printing specifications, tolerances, and design tips
• Work through the techniques of editing complex meshes, smoothing, combining shapes, and exporting them into STL files for printing
• Break down complex geometries into multiple simple shapes and model them in layers using Blender
• Design, manipulate, and export 3D models for 3D printing with Blender
• Master the art of creating meshes, scaling, subdivision, and adding detail with the Boolean modifier as well as sculpting a custom shape
• Cut a model into small pieces and understand how to design complex interlocking joints that form a part of a jigsaw puzzle

In Detail

3D printing has revolutionized the way that global industries conceptualize and design products for mass consumption. Considered as the next “trillion-dollar” business, every industry is in the race to equip its personnel with techniques to prototype and simplify complex manufacturing process. This book will take you through some simple to complex and effective principles of designing 3D printed objects using Blender.

There is a comprehensive coverage of projects such as a 3D print-ready octopus pencil holder, which will teach you how to add basic geometric shapes, and use techniques such as extruding and subdividing to transform these shapes into complex meshes. Furthermore, you'll learn to use various techniques to derive measurements for an object, model these objects using Blender, organize the parts into layers, and later combine them to create the desired object with the help of a 3D printable SD card holder ring design project. The final project will help you master the techniques of designing simple to complex puzzles models for 3D printing.

Through the course of the book, we'll explore various robust sculpting methods supported by Blender to create objects. You'll move, rotate, and scale the object, and manipulate the view. You'll edit objects with actions such as bends or curves, similar to drawing or building up a clay structure of different shapes and sizes. By the end of the book, you will have gained thorough practical hands-on experience to be able to create a real-world 3D printable object of your choice.

Style and approach

This is a hands-on guide to the world of 3D printing. With the help of simple to complex projects, you'll learn various techniques to design 3D printable objects using Blender.

Joe Larson

Joe Larson, known online as "the 3D Printing Professor," is one part artist, one part mathematician, one part teacher, and one part technologist. It all started in his youth, doing BASIC programming and low-resolution digital art on a Commodore 64. As technology progressed, so did Joe's dabbling, eventually taking him to 3D modeling while in high school and college, and he momentarily pursued a degree in computer animation. He abandoned that and instead became a math teacher, and then moved to software development for 10 years before returning to education, teaching technology in college. When Joe first heard about 3D printing, it took root in his mind, and he went back to dust off his 3D modeling skills. In 2012, he won a Makerbot Replicator 3D printer in the Tinkercad/Makerbot Chess Challenge, with a chess set that assembles into a robot. Since then, his designs on Thingiverse have been featured on Thingiverse, Gizmodo, Shapeways, Makezine, and other places. He currently produces weekly videos about design for 3D printing on his YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/mrjoesays.