3D Object Prototype: Wine Glass

Design

This week our assignment was to design a 3D object with the minimum operations of Extrusion, Revolution, and Boolean. I went through several different ideas for what I wanted to make, but I encountered difficulties when trying to include the operations.

I finally decided to make a wine glass, partially full, because it would fulfill all of those requirements, and I like wine.

I began with creating the half profile of the wine glass in the right view screen. I then used the revolve operation to turn that figure in 360 degrees to get the round glass shape that I wanted. I then created a circle on the top surface of the wine glass, extruded it, then boolean differenced the two in order to make it appear partially full.

Reflection

Overall, I think that there were a number of things that I could have done better to have a more successful project. While my model was not broken, I do wish that it had turned out better and I think there are a couple things I could have done to improve it.

First, I could have made the base and stem of my wine glass thicker, which could have helped it to print more easily, and have a sturdier base for it to print on top of. Related to that, I had issues with my base when I was trying to remove it, and if I had printed one of the removable bases for the base, I assume it wouldn’t have been such a problem.

In addition, the bottom portion of my wine glass started to slip, and I think part of the problem was that I did not add supports. I was wrong in my assumption that because the angle of my glass was not significantly wide, it would not need supports. I think if the stem had been thicker, this wouldn’t have been a problem, but as it is, it did not print properly.

I appreciate that the software, while a bit of a steep learning curve, does provide resources online where you can learn how to do any operation that you wish. I was encountering a problem where I had a line going through my wine glass after I had revolved it, and through the resources, I discovered that I just needed to select a checkbox to delete the original form after rotation.

Overall, I think this was a fun assignment to do, and has definitely sparked my interest in 3D printing.