These past two weeks have been a crash course into 3D modelling, and even from this brief intro, I can see that it is an extremely powerful skill. We started out with going over the basic tools and making random shapes, but if you showed me the lamp I’d be making in a weeks time, I wouldn’t have believed you. Even if I only retained half of what we went over (which is a lot closer to the truth than I would like) I still would have skills that greatly increase my capacity for making.
The first “real” object I made in Fusion was a simple bolt, but even then, I didn’t expect it to be as intricate as it did. The biggest thing that surprised me was how every hard edge was rounded out some how. Even though I’ve never actively thought about it, pretty much everything you touch is rounded to some degree, and that was a conscious decision that someone made.
The next week, we went through a guided tutorial on how to make a lamp, and this was the first time I had gotten really intricate with Fusion. Even now, looking back on what I made, I don’t entirely believe it. I always thought that 3D modelling was a black art of sorts, but in reality it’s extremely intuitive. It’s a lot like programming, something I’m very familiar with, but for physical objects. Programming is all about breaking a complicated process down to its individual steps, and modelling is about breaking down an object into its individual components. Now that I’ve seen how it works, I can’t wait to try more.
The next model I want to try an make is a raspberry pi case that also holds a breadboard. If you look on Thingiverse, plenty such models already exist, but my idea was to mount the breadboard upside down over the pi so that you could close the whole thing off into a small, low footprint box. The case would be in two parts so that during assembly the board would be right side up and the pi exposed, but then it would close up into a nice, clean package. I don’t anticipate too much trouble, especially since the exact measurements for the pi are everywhere online, but there’s always bound to be some unforeseen complications.