Week 05: 3D Scanning and Printing¶

Voronoi Beads¶

Organic-shaped beads I designed and printed voronoi spheres, which may be modified to a shell of the turtle robot later.

Assignments¶

Group assignment:¶

Test the design rules for your 3D printer(s)
Document your work on the group work page and reflect on your individual page what you learned about characteristics of your printer(s)

Individual assignments¶

Design, document and 3D print an object (small, few cm3, limited by printer time) that could not be easily made subtractively
3D scan an object (and optionally print it)

1. Group Assignment¶

We tested the design rules for our printer Bambu Lab P1S and documented on FabLab Kannai group work page.

I found that with some angles and bridging you can 3D print without support much more than I had imagined before.

2. Individual Assignment - 3D printing¶

2-1. first try ❌¶

I was somehow drawn to the organic shapes of voronoi structures, and dreamed that my drawing robot, which is basically a turtle robot, would have a voronoi-inspired shell. For week 5, I need to make it small, so I decided to make voronoi sphere beads.

I followed a YouTube tutorial first to create a basic voronoi sphere. However, as I printed it without support, the sphere rolled sideways while printing and did not finish. Damaged sphere

2-2. Second try ✅¶

Second, I decided to develop my own design, and also make it smaller like a bead, with walls thick enough.

As the default measurement of Blender is metres, I set up the measurement to be millimeters.

Blender settings

Then I started with a 20mm cube and added modifiers in this order.

Subdivision — Catmull-Clark (Levels Viewport: 3, Render: 5, Quality: 1)
Cast — Sphere
Decimate — Planar (Angle Limit: 30°, All Boundaries: on)
Wireframe — Thickness: 0.4mm
Subdivision — Catmull-Clark (Levels Viewport: 3, Render: 3, Quality: 3)
Cast — Sphere (Factor: 3mm)

Print with support

This time, I decided to print with support. To avoid support going inside the sphere, I checked the “on build plate only” option so that the support can be easily removed. (This time, I printed it with my Bambu Lab A1 mini at home.)

Voronoi bead

3. Individual Assignment - 3D Scanning¶

Scanned Tamiya-san

Digital Files¶

References¶

Blender 2.8 Tutorial | Parametric Voronoi Sphere | 3d Modeling