Over the last few months, the Fusion 360 team has had the opportunity to work with AngelHack, the world’s largest and most diverse hacker community that organizes Hackathons across the globe for web developers and entrepreneurs. At AngelHack Silicon Valley later this month, the winning team will be walking away with custom 3D printed trophies, designed and created by me. In this post, I’ll give you a behind-the-scenes look at how to leverage the integrated workspaces inside Fusion 360 to create some truly stunning trophies!
The goal for the Grand Prize Trophy was to create a design that could only be manufactured with 3D printing, and more specifically, with Stratasys’ PolyJet technology. This advanced technology allows for easily removable support material, multiple materials, and even the ability to mix resins at various ratios for truly custom material properties throughout the design.
This design began in the Sculpt workspace, where I started with a T-Spline cylinder, sculpting it into the silhouette shown in the first image. Next, in order to create the twisted effect, individual edge loops were rotated around, increasing as they trend to the top. Lastly, to create individual twisted “strips,” vertical sections of T-Spline faces were deleted!
To finish off the design, a knurled pattern was added around the base with a circular pattern around the cylindrical face, followed by a rectangular pattern up the base!
In addition to creating a trophy for the winning team, I designed medallions for each member of the winning team. Similar to the primary trophy, these medallions incorporate sculpted forms, as well as geometric features created in the parametric modeling workspace.
After creating the primary form of the medallion in the Model workspace, I took to the Sculpt workspace to create the free-form olive branches. In the below images you can see the individual leaf that was sculpted. To create a solid body from this surface, it needs to be stitched up in the Patch workspace. I created a patch on both of the open ends of the leaf, and stitched them together using the Stitch command, resulting in a single solid body. To finish it off, this solid body was then patterned around a circular path with the “Pattern on Path” tool, creating the individual branches.
If you’d like to follow the manufacturing process, or have any questions, be sure to follow me on Twitter as I document the 3D printing process this week!
