How to: Design Unlimited 3D Printable Vase Designs In Minutes - Blender Tutorial

what's up I'm Jonathan and welcome to maker tales where I'm sharing my maker journey to help you go further in yours so don't forget subscribe and hit that little bell icon to never miss the opportunity to keep making in this video I wanna show you how you can design vases like this less than three to five minutes so in this tutorial I want to show you a very easy and quick way on how to create a basic vase setup now from this basic vase setup I'm also going to show you how to make vases out of curves and then show you how easy it is to use modifiers to create unlimited possibility of vases and then a very basic mesh clean up and prep for 3d printing so let's start with the very basics using our starter cube but let's get into edit mode select everything and merge this down into one vertex this vertex is our primary center point where we're going to be extruding out put at maybe a good 5 centimetres out which means we now have this here and then let's just use this as a very simple vase example so let's just go a little bit out this way and then up there so this here already gives us the profile of a very simple vase now the main modifier we're going to be using to make this work is the screw modifier using this screw modifier turning off smooth shaving, shading and merging all vertex this now gives us a nice simple little shape here and you can change the steps right here so if you want you can make it really smooth or not so smooth so you can play around there I'm gonna go for something i don't know eight and then from this point here you can almost already turn this into something that can be 3d printed so in fact you could apply this then let's go back into the edit mode select that top edge hit F and this is already 3d printable in vase mode so you could select this a 3d print using the 3d print tool box and export this out for 3d printing that there is the very basic setup of vase creation and blender however I would like to show you how to make a lot more complicated and organic looking vases really easily using curves and modifiers so let's jump straight into that so working with our basic mesh vase let's go and explore curves so I'm just going to turn off this screw modifier so we get an understanding that this here is just a vertex to a vertex so it's a vertex line so selecting this we can convert this into a curve what this lets us do that in edit mode we can now select what we're wanting and change the spline type to a Bezier this now lets us literally curve our vase so if we go and add our screw modifier right now you can see that we have a live edit of what we're creating here now you can see that it's quite segmented which might be what what you're looking for but if it isn't you have to go into your curve modifier data here which lets you increase the resolution to create a very smooth if you want now once you have something that you quite like the look of you're going to have to turn it back into a mesh to be able to 3d print it so up here you can see that this is a little line that means that it's curved so when we're back in object mode having the curve selected you can convert this curve object back into a mesh see now it's a triangle so using that exact same thing let's select that top layer fill it up and that is now 3d printable in vast mode now on to the unlimited possibilities that is modifiers I'm gonna try and keep this quite concise but I'll do my best because there's a lot to cover here so modifiers let you do a lot once you have something like this one of the most favorite ones is probably subdivision this lets you really smooth out things using this viewport subdivide as you see you get quite a nasty base but I'll show you how to deal with that later on if you're not too happy with how that's looking up top you can do this subdivision curve while the top is still open and then applying the subdivision will give you that very nice smooth surface as well now another one that's quite fun to play around with is the decimate one this is one of my favorite because it gives you this low poly feel so once you get close here you get this really interesting shapes forming up another modifier that's quite interesting is triangulate now triangulate won't do much on its own because what you see here is once you apply a triangulation in the edit mode you have all these new lines now this changes the calculation of many of the modifiers so if we go and undo that triangulate and then we apply that decimate as well because we have this triangulation beforehand you'll see how different the shape is so I'm going to turn off this triangulate you can see we have quite a change there so that's one of the ones that I use to just change the the regular shape into something a little bit more irregular now working with this there's another one that works very nicely in conjunction once you have something quite low poly so I'm just going to apply this down for now is wireframe so wireframe gives you this feel of a framing like this now you can see we have an open surface up at the top here which will give us quite a bit of problems later on so let's just quickly in edit mode add and close this up and that closes up the wireframe here so this technically is 3d printable from right this point point here just by applying it and lastly one more that's pretty decent on its own is solidify so if you're wanting to really create a sturdy vase out of this you know that vase mode isn't really going to cut it unless you have a very thick nozzle on your 3d printer so let's go ahead and figure out how to use the solidify command to give you something really usable so if you hit solidify this increases the thickness of the wall as you've seen that expanded it outwards when it was minus one so that means that currently our normals of flips so let's just quickly select everything do here and do recalculate normals that flips it now inwards because it is on a minus one here so if you're wanting this to offset from the surface using both going 0.5 one way and 0.5 the other way I mean 1.5 because we're doing three millimeters so this here dictates the thickness so let's go for something crazy like five if you're wanting this to be inwards you go - if you want this to be outwards you go + okay lastly I want to just touch that you can really play about adding these two together so for instance going back to that wireframe if we go and close this object up once again so that our wireframe works nice and friendly with us we're gonna add a wireframe let's give this five millimeters but if you want to get something crazy you add a subdivision after that wireframe and look how easy it is to get something that would be incredibly difficult to model right here almost ready to print from this point now one last example is subdivision so let's go ahead and open this back up so we already have a decimate placed on this mesh so if we just go and subdivide this mesh right now this gives us a completely different look to our vase now working from here lastly 3d printers really do like having some clean geometry to work with so let's first start by cleaning up this geometry the first thing I look at is I go into the item properties and make sure that the scale is all set to one as well as the size and dimensions that I like so then I make sure that I'm exporting a file that's going to work for my needs that I'm going to need on my 3d printer once I've done that I usually go ahead and I'm gonna close this top now but before I close this top you're gonna have to see that sometimes closing the top would not be the best idea because we still have this subdivision so this can change from different outcome to outcome so I'm gonna apply this modifier now to then close my lid here because my plan is to print this out in vase mode so now with that closed there we still have the issue of our bottom this is not a lot of surface area so lastly let's go and make sure that this is 3d printable and make sure that it is flat so I'm first go ahead and sort out the flatness there's two ways of going about this my favorite way is going into edit mode selecting the faces that I want to be the bottom so let's select a good variety here and then I'm going to scale this but instead of scaling like that I'm gonna restrict it to the z-axis and just hit zero and right there we get a really nice clean flat surface to work with alternatively you can go ahead and do something called a bool cut so let's create a cube to work with here so let's create this cube a nice big cube let's go for a nice ten centimeters there open this up now because we just scale that up we've got to apply the transforms well I did this in edit mode so excuse me for that let's go out of edit mode to make sure we're making this as an individual object and then scale it up a bit let's apply all the transforms to this now just looking at it from the front let's move this down to let's say we wanted to cut it right there actually no let's go right up here somewhere let's say we only wanted that top part so to do this I use there's this bull tool in the plugins so I'm going to select this and then I'm going to select my vase then I'm gonna use my Edit bull tool Union difference and that straight away it gives me a nice flat bottom to work with now lastly to check that this is 3d printable I go into edit mode I'm just gonna select everything and I'm gonna use the 3d print toolbox again this is another add-on I let check it all out you see what we've got going on here so we've got some non flat faces so the reason why we have non flat faces is because there's too many this is not a quad it's a five point so what we're going to do is select every or instead of selecting everything which selects just the non flat faces going to clean up we're going to distort it and that there when we do check all again has removed that now it's saying that there's overhanging faces but there isn't really because what it's telling us is that the base here is overhanging but we know that that's the base so working with this here we can now export it out and that there is a 3d printed vase or might not be a 3d printed vase it's a sculpture of some sort but you can get really creative so I'm going to show you a couple of examples of things that I have both 3d printed and already modeled out to 3d in the future and now you know the incredible power of blender and vase creation a big thank you to my patreon supporters over there they're gonna get these files of forever for free and if you're interested in this these files will be free down in the description for the next three months of when this video comes out so one thing I want to mention just before we go forward and out of this video is that when you're creating these don't be stuck in the 2d front view like I was if you go out of that front view before you do your screw you can create some incredible shapes anyway thanks for watching keep making and let the quest continue

Channel: Maker Tales

Views: 20,918

Keywords: 3d printed, 3d printing, 3d print, 3d printer, make anything, vase mode, experiments, exploration, techniques, blender, easy, complicated, fast, vase 3d print, 3d printable, how to, design, 3d printing vase, vase mode design, vase experiments, tutorial, modifiers, simplify3d, voronoi, organic, lowpoly, low poly, smooth, made easy

Id: SY2vpA8zJcQ

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MakerTales]

I would love to know your thoughts? Have many of you used blender for 3D Printing?