Half-sphere 3D printable puzzle prototype

This post has the basic process I used to make this prototype spherical puzzle as well as some context as to what got me interested in Making:

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Myminifactory has another design competition going on right now, and it reminded me of why I initially got interested in the whole Maker movement.

It was approximately 2 years ago and I was looking on Kickstarter when I noticed the Codex Silenda, which had just been funded:

All Codex Silenda imagery is copyright Brady Whitney

I'd sadly arrived too late to get my hands on a codex (not that I had the money... I think I could have forked out the 80$ for the Laser Files at the time, but I'd have been cutting down on food for a month or so hehe)

Sadly, it looks like it'll be another year and a half before the Codex is on sale through their website, although they ARE selling limited-edition premium Codices based on the one they got featured in an episode of NCIS New Orleans.

Anyway, this is one of the earliest things I remember that got me interested in making, though it took a long time before I attempted to make anything myself.

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I got the idea by watching the video that came with the Make Anything competition:

Here's a very fast sketch of the overall design process.

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1. Make the sphere

I am, as usual, using Vectary to design my models.

2. Draw all the puzzle pieces.

To do this, you need to ensure you've got snapping enabled in this manner:

AKA., you can draw lines that start near one of the already existing lines, then goes out and forms the puzzle shapes, and finally ending near the original line, like so:

Repeat that in the shapes and directions you want so that every piece is linked to every other.

Here's that initial piece "connected" to every surrounding piece:

3. make every puzzle piece a single distinct face

As you could see one the last image, we've got some extra lines of our puzzle piece to eliminate

Now just eliminate those, by eliminating the extra lines one piece at a time and then filling up the hole left with a single face:

So, remove the two lines that are "part" of the puzzle piece

and then use the fill holes tool ( that only appears when the software detects a hole) to automatically fill the hole with a single face:

4. Bevel all the lines of our puzzle pieces.

This will create the clearance between pieces by using the Bevel tool ()

Here's what that looks like after the bevel's done:

5. "Extrude" the line parts inwards

This is to make the outlines of the pieces into actual puzzle pieces.

first, select the lines that we need to remove later

To do the extrusion, you first need to use the Gizmo () tool to set the "context" of the tool to be local, instead of global

Then, extrude() the lines inwards by approx. 1 mm (more than that and you begin to get self-intersections that make the boolean step to make actual puzzle pieces, which is the next step, impossible)

6. Boolean a smaller version of the original sphere out of the puzzle sphere

The smaller sphere needs to be big enough that it cuts into the interior extrusions, like so :

NOTE: You NEED to use the mesh editor tool () to triangulate () the entire puzzle piece sphere before the Boolean, or the plugin will inform you our puzzle pieces are non-polygonal faces, which it can't work with at all.

Here, for ease of presentation, I've cut the first layer with the puzzle pieces in half, leaving the second sphere intact underneath (which is also highlighted in yellow).

As you can see, this makes it much easier to see when the two models are at the proper proportions so that the Boolean will remove the middle AND cut the different puzzle pieces into separate bits, like so:

And that's it !

I DID combine the boolean with an addition to have a Hanger type top piece too, as a bonus, though I imagine hanging a puzzle might be a tad risky if I don't add some kind of wire frame to build the entire puzzle on:

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Here's some more pictures of the model, which is customizable over on Vectary and the .STL is over on MyMiniFactory:

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As always, the pictures of the model and creation process are released under CC0, while the model itself is released under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 and any donations can go to: peterbock.eth