Using blender 3d to create stl for CW pattern

John, great tips. I've learned most of them the hard way already. :)

I don't worry too much about the occasional triangle in my quads if it gets me the geometry I am looking for. Haven't played a whole lot yet with n-gons.

For blender users: quads =4 sides; triangles=3; n-gon=more than 4 sides. Blender can use them all but when rendering n-gons they can produce weird effects and when porting to stl can create weird angles/points. But sometimes they also work fine. So a little experimenting is good when exporting or rendering for a pattern.

I also don't worry too much about joining different objects unless I am sculpting together. It is super easy to join objects together in blender.

For blender users, select the objects you want to join and then hit Ctrl-J (or join button). The different objects are now one object for editing. To separate objects go to edit mode and select the object you want to separate from the larger object by select it using L key and then press P and separate by selection.

For my lion bust effort...I am calling it a failure. I'll give myself a C- grade. I could not find a good reference image that had front and side references so tried to do it with only one image. My animal anatomy knowledge is not strong enough to fill in the holes of my modeling. I am still trying to figure out a good way to create hair for carving as well. The blender software has a wonderful native hair particle system that works great for rendering but not so much for stl exporting. Back to the drawing board or more probable another project.

-Oscar

In Post #55 in this thread you have a horse and rider how did you give it depth?

I modeled it as a curved surface (2.5d) from the beginning and not a flat surface. They are 5 different objects. The horse, rider, saddle, mane, tail. For depth I like to keep the models at around .5 inches. 1 blender unit = 1 inch when ported as an STL so easy reference. Keep the geometry as low as possible to start and then add additional geometry for more detail if needed.

I've done stuff like that in blender. Where you use the sculpting tools to bump up separate objects. It works pretty good while constraining the scupting to just the z axis.

Alan, exactly. You are constrained to the z-axis. For everyone else, this means you are modeling to exactly what you want carved so you are limited on being able to orient the 3d object to create different views of a pattern. What you see and build is what you will get as a pattern.

Figured out a technique for carving hair using the blender particle hair system.

Create your particle system.

Reduce number of strands to something manageable like 200.

Set children to something not crazy.

Convert the hair particle to curves.

Add a curve circle.

Select the hair curves and with the curve modifier screen set your taper and bevel using the curved circle. Change the size of the circle to something you like.

Go to edit mode and change direction of the hair curves to set the taper at the ends instead of at the root.

Finally change to hair curves to mesh. Easy carveable hair. Much happier with the end result. This took literally about 1 minute to do. I think with a little patience and some stylish combing you can create some good looking hair. Model and pattern still look terrible but the hair portion looks pretty good in my opinion (especially compared to my first attempt).

Oscarl,

Nice direction on the hair...I usually just sculpt..zbrush and max both have particle systems for rendering but I never looked into converting...nice tip

I am glad it helped. I'd been trying to figure this out for about 6 months. Totally frustrated for a long time on how to do this.

Sculpting hair as a texture on a surface works pretty good for carving.
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Alan, very nice modeling. I have tried that on a few of my patterns to sculpt hair but mostly I am not very good at it yet. Much easier and way faster to have the software do it for me if I can. Just another tool in the toolbox.

Hair as a texture will carve but if you sand it down it doesn't turn out so good. Hair should be thick. The hair you have on the lion pattern is pretty thick.

It takes longer to carve hair, but it can make a pattern look more interesting especially on screen.

I've been trying to do patterns without so much texture. Like this lion that has smooth curved surfaces.

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