Designing with Geometry

I happened into the very lucky circumstance of my roommate getting a 3d printer. I had tried learning to make 3d models once before but bounced to another project quickly after staring. With access to a 3d printer the spark of motivation was reignited. But what do I make with the limitless potential of a 3d printer?

I didn't want to take on too complex of a design for my first project. Since this project would end up as a physical piece, I wanted something that would feel cool to hold in my hand. I decide to bring an item from a videogame I played to life, a throwing star named "Ilbi" from Maple Story. Maplestory is an older 2d mmo so I thought bringing some simple pixel art into 3d wouldn't be too difficult.

Now comes the part where I need to figure out how to actually make a 3d model. I did some research and followed some tutorial to learn the basics. For this project I used a browser based CAD(computer assisted design) software called tinkerCAD. With this software you can create basic shapes like boxes, balls, and cones. You can add blocks together or use them to cut out of other shapes.

While I have some experience making art, a few ceramics classes in college learning to throw on a pottery wheel and some dabbling in various hobbies like crochet and wood burning, I still don't quite identify myself as an artist. I'm taking on this project partly to push my artistic boundaries and develop my design process. Through out the design phase I broke the shape down to its simplest forms and worked my way back through its complexities one step at a time.

Now I knew what I wanted to make and had some experience with the necessary tools. The basic shape looked like a circle with 8 triangles pointing out of it so that's what I started with. I built a cylinder and made 2 differently sized triangular prisms. Once I found the right size and position, I copied 3 sets and positioned them symmetrically.

The next step was to cut the center hole with another cylinder.

Now that had the basic shape the points of the star needed some flare so I curved the edges of the triangular prisms with some elliptic cylinders.

With the 2d shape recreated, I needed to bring this into 3d space. The edges of the stars needed to have a bevel on them so that, not only would the tip of the stars be pointy, but the edges would also look sharp. I had to play around a lot with which shapes to use to cut out these bevels. I ended up using a cylinder on its side to cut out the bevel along the edges. I wanted a nice transition between the points of the star and the base so I capped the end of the cylinder with a hemiellipsoid (like a hemisphere but but squished a bit).

With the large points I ended up using much wider cylinders so its a bit harder to see what's going on but its essentially the same process as the smaller points.

All that was left was to print it.