3D modelling a “sparkling water” bottle

Ryan
Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:27:08 +0000
Lab Assignment, Week 1, 3D modeling, Getting Started with WordPress, reflection

How easy/hard

While modeling, I realized that this digital platform is much easier and more convenient than traditional clay as for the latter, our hands get dirty and we can’t make perfect shapes. It’s also easy because it offers a large amount of tools for constructing 3D objects such as “revolve”, “extrude”, “create form”, and “fillet”. The sort of cylindrical and regular shape of my model means that one could rather easily use fusion 360 to design it. But what seemed particularly hard to me was being able to model the bottom of the bottle which is not flat in reality(although my model shows it is), but rather have a bunch of protruding parts. That is probably because of its somewhat irregular nature.

Elements that particularly bogged me down

I think I was trying to add some color to the model to reflect the actual object. I also wanted to make the surface look transparent, make it look like plastic, add a packaging design that reads “sparkling water”, amongst others. I was obviously not able to achieve these. Also, the fact that I don’t have a 3 button mouse but just a track pad, it was not so practical. Something that I have yet to master is to make the model such that the parts of it are to scale.

Compromises that I had to make

The side of the bottle had much intricacies that I could not accurately reproduce in my model. Also, I made the bottom of the bottle flat because it was hard to make it have projections as in the actual bottle. Furthermore, I did not attach a cork to the head of the bottle model although in the model there wasn’t any hole at the top.

Tip for novice users

It helps to understand the theory before diving into the practical. For example, once you understand that the tool “revolve” could be used to produce models which are “circularly” symmetric in the sense that you always see the same thing by looking in any direction in the plane perpendicular to the axis, or that that the tool “fillet” is for rounding edges, then you would know what tools to use to design what model. If you spend no/little time on the theory, practicing would be hard as you would be always trying things out randomly until they work.

side view of model

Bottom View of Model

Top View of Model