by Emma Woo
Starting an internship at WMSI was daunting at first, because I had never done online design before, and was totally new to any CAD software. I started with the challenge of designing a 3D animal using the free online software TinkerCAD, to get a sense for that type of design. My goal was to create a Harry Potter patronus tutorial for kids to follow at a camp.
Using just geometric 3D shapes, such as spheres, cones and cylinders, I began to sculpt a lion:
The face was the most difficult part. I ended up making the head in another file so it was easier to edit. There were SO MANY CONES!!
After I finally finished my lion, I began to realize that 3D printing is not the same as 2D paper and ink prints. The object is built with one continuous string of plastic that creates a gridded internal support, and is printed from the bottom up. While there are software that automatically add printed support for places where the object hoovers over the ground, this made the many cones in my lion very difficult to print. I decided to blow up the size of the head and print it by itself, so that I could begin to understand how a 3D printer works.
The print turned out okay, but I had to basically chisel it out from all of the supports the printer needed to create the lion’s mane, since the cones had to print from the bottom up. Many of the printed supports were thicker than the cones to begin with. I decided to split the head in half, and see if could create two halves that would fit together smoothly, and I could avoid the chiseling process.
Yeah it didn’t work out how I hoped. The pieces didn’t connect smoothly. Remembering our initial goal of having kids at a camp made their own 3D printed animals, not only did the process seem much too time consuming, it also was difficult to get a good print of the animals and took a long time to print. We decided to switch to 2D, still making a 3D print, but only focusing on the silhouette of the animal.
This process turned out to be much more simple for a number of reasons, one being a “scribble” tool that allows you to click and drag your cursor to draw what you want to create, instead of being limited by the geometric 3D shapes. It was a much faster and more kid friendly option. The camp ran over our Winter vacation, and was a huge success!!
