Hi there, I’m currently working on designing a drone for aerial cinematography/photography and I never thought about how I would go about making a mold. Basically, what I want to do is 3D print my model (drone canopy) and fabricate it in carbon fiber. But I don’t want to “wrap” the 3D print since that would defeat the purpose of a light weight part in the first place. Now the only way I would be able to have a model that is entirely carbon fiber (without any 3d printed materials wrapped inside) would be to print the model inside outessentially making it into a mold to layout the carbon fiber fabric and solidify it. That’s where you guys come in since I have no idea of how to even approach this. I currently don’t have any 3d files available since the design is still in the sketching stages. However if you guys would like a reference image as to how the canopy of the drone will look like, here:
That isn’t an exact model of what I’m trying to do but it gets the point across that my model will be pretty organic. Any methods or plugins (free preferably) as to how I should approach this would be highly appreciated. Thanks!
Personally I would suggest you look at Thomthom’s SubD plugin.
Not free, but this took minutes and could be easily worked into the two halves of a mold.
That’s a pretty clean model. I was looking into Artisan Toolset for Sketchup actually. Which would you recommend? They’re pretty much the same price. But how exactly did you split it down the middle like that? That’s PRECISELY the solution to my problem
To split that model is quite simple as the structure of SubD gives you easy sections to work with.
You need to understand how to use Quads as they make life very simple.
As you can see here using the most basic method I can just select the various regions and group them.
Oh wow, that looks pretty neat. I suppose I’ll download the trial version of SubD first and buy it later on in the week since it looks like something I can use quite often. Thanks for your help!
