Surface Modeling Lamps

Lately, I've been thinking about buffing up my surface modeling skills, which I'm sure everyone else thinks about too, from time to time. 

I have a good amount of experience in several 3D modelling environments, but I rarely have had the need to use surfaces, which are typically useful for more free-flowing, organic designs (the bane of any self-respecting engineering education).

However, I rather like free-flowing, organic designs. So, after a bit of poking around on the internet for inspiration, I decided to work on a 3D-printable lamp shade.

First things first, I went looking for inspiration designs to practice. I browsed Pinterest until I found some designs that interested me; I've used this platform many times in the past as a rabbit-hole of inspiration images, and it didn't fail to deliver here.

Now for the fun part! After watching some videos for guidance, I took to Fusion 360's Surface Modeling tools to start building my own versions of the inspiration lamps. In order to accomplish the designs, I used surface lofts, sweeps, and plenty of splines.

I also intentionally tried to copy each design closely, rather than branch out into something of my own creation. My self-imposed challenge here was to create something just as I saw it, using surfaces.

This was really fun, and good practice with the surfacing tools of Fusion 360.  I was able to really get into a creative flow, just playing around with interesting forms created from simple geometry.

Now, at heart, I'm a Solidworks 3D modeler, as I'm sure is true of most of my generation of engineers. However, I've found the free, cloud-based version to be unusably slow. So, without shelling out big bucks for a personal license, Fusion is the next best thing.

However, this challenge did really end up highlighting the limits of Fusion as a program. There were often things that I wanted to create, for which the solution was clunky or non-existent. 

For example, I wanted to create a circular pattern of splines to use as guides for a lofted surface. However, there was no built-in functionality to do that, and I had to copy-and-paste-and-rotate the splines by hand, individually. I found myself often wishing for the depth and utility of my one true love, Solidworks. I guess you get what you pay for.

Anyway, gripes aside, on to printing the thing!

I chose to go with the middle design for initial printing; I figured the cutouts in the middle of the form would be good windows for the flickering light of a candle to be seen through, and shine out from.

For illumination, I found some imitation LED tea candles on Amazon, which could simply be dropped into the lampshade surface form.

I'd say I'm moderately happy with the results. There is some low-hanging room for improvement: refining the form, getting a better surface finish on the 3D print, print out some of the other designs, and work on some custom designs of my own.

Originally, I had planned for a Stage 2 of this project, where I would work on creating a lampshade of my own design. However, life sort of got in the way of these plans: I got a job and put my projects on the shelf, for the time being.

For now, though, I've accomplished what I set out to do with this project, improving my model surfacing skills dramatically. I'll return to some more surfacing in the future, I'm sure!