Turn Yourself into a Vase with SketchUp! (i.e. Making Revolved Portrait Sculptures from Silhouettes for 3D Printing)

Turn Yourself into a Vase with SketchUp! (i.e. Making Revolved Portrait Sculptures from Silhouettes for 3D Printing)

by Alex Schreyer2 Comments
You likely have seen the effect before: An image like the one above shows some shapes that look like vases. After a little while, however, you notice that the curved shapes that define the vases are actually faces - or more specific: the negative silhouette of the faces. As it turns out, this can easily be accomplished in SketchUp. Turning these shapes into real objects is also pretty simple these days as long as you have access to a 3D printer, a CNC lathe or can browse the web, where you can order 3D printed objects from any of the vendors that I list on this page. Follow these steps to turn yourself (or a loved one) into a vase: 1. Take a good silhouette picture. Then import it into SketchUp. For this first step, we will be using a technique similar to the one that I employed for the tree cutout component in Chapter 5. 2. On the exploded picture, trace the...
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Unwrapping a Double-Curved Shell

Unwrapping a Double-Curved Shell

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
As you saw in example 4.6 in the book, unfolding a developable surface in SketchUp is very easy using the Unfold plugin. What do you do then, if you have a doubly-curved shape, such as the one shown above (from chapter 6)? Obviously, you can't just "flatten" it without distorting it (take the Mercator projection of world maps for an example of how unwrapping a sphere can lead to significant distortions). In this case, it might be a good strategy to unfold the surface in strips using the same technique described in example 4.6. This gives you the ability to cut the surface into separate parts that can then be assembled using gluing, welding etc. The image below illustrates how this looks after flattening. TIP:This can now be done much easier with my Unwrap and Flatten Faces extension. As you may have noticed, I also added some glue tabs using the Glue Tabs plugin (see chapter 4 for details). In order to...
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