[Oscar36]

I am becoming a fair weather woodworker. My joints hurt in the cold of winter and I hate sweating buckets in heat of summer (non-insulated garage/shop). Which just leaves a small window to make sawdust.

In the meantime I entertain myself by making models and patterns for my library. Modeled in Blender 3d and Zbrush and exported as STLs to the Carvewrigt Designer cnc software.

Here are a few of my latest ones.

 

[marecat3]

very nice. I tried to get into blender 3d but I just can't get started.

 

[Oscar36]

To be honest, it took me several starts to get the hang of it. The software has a steep learning curve but there is an aha moment where things start to make sense. If you ever try again just focus on the polygonal modeling portion (moving points around in edit mode of the model geometry) and ignore everything else. Even sculpting. Small steps of learning one small thing at a time.

But if you get a hang of it there is absolutely nothing you can't model and carve. My problem now is I don't have the creativity and imagination to make the super cool patterns. Here is a sampling of some of my patterns.

 

[marecat3]

what can the models be exported as?

 

[Oscar36]

From blender 3d you have a lot of choices. There are more but these are mainly the ones I use for import/export.

Collada .dae
Alembic .abc
STL .stl
FBX .fbx
Wavefront .obj
AutoCad .dxf
Curves .svg

I can also render image height maps from the models as pictures in all the main 2d formats. Sometimes on really deep models I can get an acceptable pattern by doing this.

From Zbrush I think you are limited to obj, vrml, and stl.

My cnc software uses images as height maps (jpg, png) and stl importer (paid add on).

 

[gwilki]

@Oscar36 I love these. I downloaded Blender, but after watching a few videos, chickened out.

Did all of your designs start out as 2D graphics that you made 3D using Blender? If so, it looks like I should start learning.

 

[Oscar36]

Yes, mostly. I try to find as many reference images as I can so I can see front, sides, top, bottom if I don't know the geometry very well. Then I start modeling in 3d to try to recreate the object.

So (sometimes) image reference => to 3d model => to STL object or depth image => to cnc pattern.

Here is how I made a frame pattern I shared a while ago on here.