Cool
Hey guys Devin here
And I'd say it's very likely that vases are the most 3D printed thing out there at all
After all, a lot of slicers come with a special spiralize or vase mode made especially for printing vases and
That mode also makes really clean prints so you often see demo printers printing out
Beautiful beautiful vases for that reason a lot of people are just plain sick of 3D printed vases
But after the success of my spin vase, and then this chromatic vase that I created
Well, I got a little bit carried away, and as you can see I printed a lot more
Personally, I still really like vases because I consider myself both a product designer and an artist and while product designers
prioritize the function of an object artists prioritize the form
Vases are technically functional objects, but they're also very much sculptures
And I think that makes them a very great object to experiment around
That said I'm starting this little series of sorts called vase exploration. Kind of like space exploration
Not my best pun, but I'm sticking with it. I want to start by talking about this vase right here
Which I call the drip vase. I posted a little teaser of it on Instagram and
Basically I wanted to be a little deceptive
Unfortunately, I didn't invent a new method of printing in midair. Rather I just printed things a little differently
Here's that drip vase printing again and as you may have guessed this isn't the exact orientation that it was printed in
To see that you got to back up and flip things around
There we go
That's right the key to printing this model is a sideways printer and the way I designed this was pretty simple
I made this in Fusion 360
starting with a simple revolve for that vase form, and then one by one I added all these little drip shapes and
we'll skip through that because it took longer than I care to admit
and now we've got all these perfectly horizontal shapes and
While these are modeled solid when you print in vase mode it only prints the outline of the shape
So these turn into open loops as you can see here
This was a smaller scale version that I printed first just to test the concept and it worked surprisingly well
Since that worked
I scaled things up and
Printed that larger version of the vase as you can see this sideways printer kind of affects the first layer
And it's not that pretty, but after that first layer everything starts printing just as if the printer was standing right ways up
You can see those little holes wherever there's a drip and that's because of this vase mode only following the very outline
The concept here isn't too different from that popular hairy lion print you may have seen before, but by printing this sideways
I don't have to do any post-processing or cleaning up. Those strands just float off to the side
Once the print is complete I can put the printer back up, restore some order and just pop this thing off
You've got to be very careful removing these vase mode prints because they're only a single layer thick
But here's the end result, and I think it's really cool
But more than anything this was just an experiment to see if this is possible
From the top view you can see the shape of those drips are actually preserved relatively well
So it would be interesting to see what more complex shapes might be possible with this technique, but for now
Let's move on to my next experiment
Many of you may be aware that it's possible to just swap out filament partway through a print to get two color prints on a
single extruder however the color change is always perpendicular to the bottom of the print and I wanted things to look a little different
So I came up with this tilt vase that has a diagonal color change instead
It's something that would be easy to do with a dual color printer, but to achieve this with a simple single extruder printer
I had to be a bit clever with my design. If you look carefully you'll see it's not just the color change that's diagonal
But all the layers as well and while the idea might be non-obvious, it's actually very simple
I just started with a regular vase form like this, and then I tilted it within my modeling software
then I added these custom supports that allow this vase to actually be printed at this angle and
The trick is just to make sure that the vase has a rather shallow angle so it's still not
Overhanging too much even when it's tilted like this and the support structure itself also has a tiny point one four millimeter gap
That way after it's printed it's easy enough to break away
Here you can see the vase printing out on my Taz 6 using poly smooth filament and
Just as I was hoping with a little bit of wiggling around those bottom supports do break off relatively cleanly
The bottom is a bit rough here from bridging, but that could easily be sanded and the rest of the model looks just great
My Taz 6 does show quite a bit of layer lines, but for this model
it actually looks like more of a feature than a fault
Even beyond that diagonal color change the sideways layers look cool for the whole vase
Here's another one I printed out in PLA, and the bottom broke off a lot easier on this one
This one came out a bit more clean, and I really love that metallic Vertigo Grey filament by Fillamentum
It's a great contrast with that white filament on top
I also printed out this little baby vase
Which I smoothed out using the Polymaker poly smooth machine which will have its own video in the future
Alright guys
I hope this video serves as an example of how an idea as simple and overdone as 3D printed vases
still has a lot of room for exploration and doing new things with the tilt vase I tilted the model and
With the drip vase I tilted the printer itself
So these are just two examples of different ways that you can push 3D printing and I used
vases as a way to show that
That's what this series vase exploration is all about
I hope you guys like this first episode because I've got some more really crazy ideas that I'm trying out with these vases and
Hopefully, I'll come up with even more. If you're lucky enough to have a 3D printer
And you want to try these out for yourself
You can visit my mini factory where I have all these files
Available for free. If you want these already printed vases that I'm holding in my hand right now
I'm going to sell those as well in my personal store which I'll also link to in the description
These will kind of be popping up slowly on my own website. Alright, that's it for my first episode of
vase exploration
Until next time I'm Devin. This is Make Anything. Don't forget to stay inspired
