Vessel Printing

 

I was inspired by these designs below and was trying to make something similar.

I built bunch of stars with 16 sides and rotated even numbered layers. And then used loft feature.

I tried different start point or direction or the settings (Loose / Tight..) when making a lofted shape.

And the final shape I got is below.

This is the mixture of the first and the second shape from those 5 shapes above, and I thought this is exactly what I wanted. However, I found a problem that it won't make shell or wouldn't boolean difference or union.

I also adopted old design from old project, that has interesting shapes.

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I asked my Instructor about the problem that I had, and got solutions and advice.

1. Won't BooleanUnion : Use Join

2. Trim the bottom to be flat, so that it will be printable.

However, I still had the problem that I couldn't shell. So I was seeking for a solution.

Firstly, after trim the bottom, I figured that my shape has multiple shapes, as my instructor pointed out.

And I was worried that it might not be a good shape to print out, so was trying to edit it in simpler shape. To figure out how the inside of my shape, I cut it half vertically, and figured that it has multiple hollow shape in side of the outer shell.

The first approach that I made found out that it's not the right one. I tried to trim out the hollow shapes from the bottom, however there was numerous misunderstanding on this shape; Even though I trim the part up, the outer shell has very organic shape with different thickness vertically so I don't even know how tall this hollow shapes are and how tall they are. so trimming hollow part was not the right approach.

Misunderstanding on the shape. The inner star shape's points are not sitting on one circle.

When I was trying to trim the shape that is in the circle, since almost all the points were not sitting on the circle, I couldn't get the result that I wanted to get.

So I tried multiple sided shape, and it didn't let me have the shape either.

When I made it work, it just revealed another problem: Even though the bottom shape was trimmed and in one shape, I still has hollow shapes alongside the outer shell, and it might be problematic. To keep the balance of my shape, i couldn't trim it up to where it starts splitting.

The second approach that I made was trimming each surface of the 2 shapes. So I exploded my shape and trimmed it so that the shape won't have any hollow space anymore.

It worked and I rebuilt my shape with these small pieces that are trimmed that can't have any shallow space anymore.

As a result, I could get a 1 shaped bottom as you can see below.

I added bottom and top so that I am able to shell the shape, however it didn't work saying that this object is an open object.

I at the same time thought I could also improve the look of the shape, so I used command 'Loft to made it look like below.

This picture below is a failed shape with one of the new part won't join with other two parts.

 

Which still turned out that it's an open space. And then I remembered that after trim command, the trimmed shapes had overlapping space as seen below, and that might be making this situation. So I edited each shape and could make it into a closed shape.

< Left: Open surface with overlapping pieces / Right: Closed surface with non overlapping pieces >

After making my shape into closed shape, I could finally shell it.

I could find the shell didn't work perfectly when cut it in half.

I talked about this with my printing instructor, and they didn't think this is problematic.

However, when we brought it to Prusa Slicer Program, it couldn't make layer by layer look.

And we couldn't figure out what is the problem, so I will bring this to my instructor tomorrow and figure it out.