How to Design Unique Vases in Blender for 3d Printing - The easy way

All right, welcome back, guys. TechNiverse here. Today we are going to be going over how to make a base for 3D printing in Blender 2.8 using a couple simple modifiers. This is going to be a short and sweet tutorial. Basically, what we're going to do is start off with the basics here. We're going to tab into our edit mode, Alt-A to deselect all, and hit Z to go into wireframe mode. That way I can see all the vertices. I'm going to remove quite a few of these and to make sure I'm grabbing the right ones, I'm going to hit 3, that'll give me my side view, or 1, that'll give me my front view. These are the ones I want to remove. I'm going to keep these two right here. Go ahead and hit X, vertices, and that leaves us with these two vertices right here. I'm going to hit 3 again to go into my side view since I kept the side vertices, and I'm going to take this guy right here, and using translate, I'm going to position it right on the origin here, or as close to it as I can get, and that's pretty simple. This is the bottom of our base. Now, I want to ensure that I am in orthographic view here and not perspective. That will ensure that my lines stay on the same plane depth-wise, and well, you'll see what I mean in just a second. Basically, this is going to be the base of our base. I'm going to take and extrude, and all I'm doing is hitting E and dragging it about here. You can also select ones you've already chosen and drag those around. The important thing here is to remember, I'm making a base, so it's not, I don't want it to have to use support, and I don't want to have any super extreme overhangs, so pretty gradual is best, although you can do some pretty cool stuff, as long as you're cautious of the fact that anything over a 45 degree angle is likely going to require support, and that is not ideal for a base. So, this one's going to look a little bit, I think, like a pop bottle with some ridges on it, and that's fine. I want to make sure that my inverse just comes straight across and meets back at this same place. So, now that I've done that, I can go ahead and hit tab, and what I want to do is go into the modifiers here. That's this wrench, and the first modifier I want to add is going to be the screw modifier. As you can see, it immediately gives me this base-like shape. It's got the little ridges in there and stuff like that. That's kind of cool. I do want to hit calc order here, because that changes the order that it calculates the normals in, and I want to hit merge vertex. So, now that we're done with that, we can go ahead and hit apply on that. The next thing we're going to want to do is hit z and go back into solid mode, get a little bit better view of what our base looks like here, and as you can see, the bottom is hollow. So, we need to go back into edit mode, and what we want to do is make a face connecting this bottom rim. Now, I'm selecting everything from the bottom up, and then I'm going to do this. I'm going to back up, hit z to go back into wireframe, c to get my circle selector, and then I'm clicking the mouse wheel. Well, it should deselect it. My mouse is a little wonky at the moment. All right, fine. Well, what the heck? There we go, but my mouse broke for a second. Really? I think my mouse is broken. Okay. Maybe it just doesn't know which one to grab for some reason. Nope. Okay. Well, we'll do this the slightly longer way then. Alt a to deselect all. Still doesn't take too long. I'm just holding down shift and selecting the bottom innermost vertices here, and f to face it. So, now we have our face there, and it should be a nice 90 degree bottom. So, now that we've done that, the next thing we want to do is add our second modifier, and that's going to be the solidify modifier. Now, this will give it some depth and an inner surface. What you want to do is switch back to object mode with the tab button, hit z and go back into wireframe, and you can see as I drag the thickness up here, you can see how the inside of the base thickens. So, if I hit z again and go back into solid, you can again see the thickness of this base. So, we don't need anything like that. That'd be super thick and kind of ridiculous. We want to kind of keep it right about there, I should say. Go ahead, hit the apply button, and now we're going to add our last modifier, and that is going to be the subdivision surface, and here we have our base. So, hit apply on that, then file, export, file, export, stl. Now, you'll notice I didn't do this to scale. All right, I've got my object opening here, and as you can see, it's super tiny. So, we use the scale factor here. You can easily set up Blender so it's using the right scale, so it will give you the proper dimensions and everything, but I didn't really take the time to do that. I wasn't too concerned with it. I knew I could just size it up here, but if you need exact dimensions, you're going to want to do that in order to get the dimensions that you specify. So, no support, 1550, infill 20%. That's looking good. Two millimeter. All right, we're going to go ahead and slice this. Now, obviously, I could make this quite a bit larger. As you see, it's not taking up much of my build plate, but this is just a demonstration on how to use Blender to make such a base, so I don't necessarily need to make the base other than to show you that this process works properly. So, I'm just going to make a small version, and if you desire a giant one, feel free to print one however big you want. There are infinite numbers of different designs you can do using this process, basically just creating the profile of the base and then using the screw modifier to make it circular like that. I find it much easier than grabbing a cylinder, although I will make a video doing that, too, because there is some interesting topology things you can do with the mesh with the cylinder that I suppose I could have also done to this, but I like the nice organic shape to it, so we're going to leave it how it is for now. Looks like it's going to take 43 minutes. This is a nice, fast print. I'm going to save it and throw it on the printer, and we will be back to show you the results. All right, so here we have our base. It's more of a thimble, really. You can tell from the size, but it came out pretty nice. The shape is there, nice and smooth. I do have a little bit of artifacting in here. That's not from the model. That's because I got impatient and turned the speed up on my printer. Like I said, I got a lot of stuff to print for this festival, and I wanted to get a video out this week, so you can see my seam here. I don't know why it's putting it relatively in the same spot, but this here can be taken care of with randomized z-seam. With bases, I like to leave it in a line because you can always put that in the back. You normally don't see 360 degrees on a base anywhere if it's on a shelf or on a table or whatever, so this came out pretty well. I could do a full-size one. In fact, I think I probably will, but we'll save showing you that one for another video. Maybe at the end of the video, we're going to do on designing without the modifiers because we can do a little bit more unique stuff. That's going to be it for this video, guys. We appreciate you stopping by. As always, guys, I am Techniverous. Thanks for watching this video. Don't forget to hit the like button. You can subscribe right here by clicking on the icon. I put a couple videos up in the corner. One of them is going to be my latest video, my latest upload, and the other one is going to be what YouTube recommends for you, so feel free to check those out. Don't forget to hit that bell for notifications down below, and we'll see you guys next time.