I found that initially this project in Fusion360 was very challenging but as I began to get more familiar with the software it got much easier. By the end of making this water bottle I felt much more comfortable with Fusion360 than I had felt when I started just a few hours before. The elements that bogged me down the most were the curved upper part of the bottle and the handle on the lid. When I initially tried to make the curved upper part of the bottle I was trying to make it as a part of the body of the water bottle. However, I later realized that it would be easier if I created a small band around the top of the body of the water bottle and then used the fillet tool to get the curved appearance. For the handle on the lid, the hardest part was to create a curve that I could follow that would match the curve of the handle in real life. Also, it took me a little while to realize that the best way was to create the curve and then sweep a shape along the curve, because originally I was trying to use a pipe but that only let me do a circle, square or triangle shape which wasn’t what I wanted. The biggest compromise I had to make was with the handle. The handle still doesn’t fit perfectly to the top of the bottle, and it actually goes through the lid a little bit if you look closely which is not what I was trying to do. However, I wasn’t able to figure out a good way to fix it so my compromise was getting it as close to the shape I wanted and then just being ok with it going slightly through the lid on both sides. One tip I have for other Fusion360 users is to build up the object in little pieces and then move them into place to assemble the object. For example, I used this strategy to create the top for the water bottle since it was much easier to create the top on the x-y plane and get it to look the way I want and then move it to the top of the water bottle than it would have been to build each part of the lid in the space on top of the water bottle part I had already created. I think the biggest humanistic use for this tool would be in modeling either physical objects or creating visualizations of things that we only have descriptions of. For example, if there is maybe a written description of an ancient Greek building you could use a 3D modeling tool to create a visualization of what that building might have looked like. You could then share that model throughout the world so that other people could see what that building may have looked like.
2 thoughts on “3D Modeling Post”
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The issue of your handle going through the lid of your water bottle is interesting, is it perhaps because of the shape of your curve? Maybe if you had a handle that was straight on both sides and then curved at the top it would not have cut through the lid. Otherwise i thought your tip on Fusion360 was very useful and I wish I had known I could do that before doing this project.
Love the verity of textures on the bottle! On note of this “if there is maybe a written description of an ancient Greek building you could use a 3D modeling tool to create a visualization of what that building might have looked like” I hadn’t really thought of this as a space to explore the idea of what things looked like without having a model to go off of, but that’s a great idea to have theory’s on what could have been based off descriptions and maybe some on-site archeology!