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Silly Sheep Cuffilinks

FullSizeRender ><

Just got these in the post. Pretty pleased with how they turned out.

So for a few years now I’ve been doing the comics page for a newspaper that my girlfriend Liz has been writing for her friends since she was about 9 years old. Once laboriously handwritten and photocopied Liz, I recently created a font based on her handwriting.The comic is called Silly Sheep. It’s silly.

_gallery _gallery _gallery

Anyway, daft as it is, I’ve gotten pretty attached to drawing these sheep, and given that I’ve not been doing so much Blender stuff lately, I thought it would be fun to have a go at creating something that I could 3D print based on Silly Sheep. So, I fired up Blender and made myself a pair of cufflinks. The design isn’t particularly complex, just a face for once side and a wooden gate (which appears in every comic) on the other. I measured up an existing pair of cufflinks to get the rough dimensions I needed so that the rear part would fit through a buttonhole, and the spar between the two parts was an appropriate length. I gave the spar a slight bend to let the two sides of the cuff come together at more of an angle. Here’s some screenshots of the design in Blender.

BlenderSS1 ><

Because I wanted to be sure they functioned as cufflinks before printing in metal, i ordered a pretty cheap initial print of the design from Shapeways in their Black Strong and Flexible material.

Test Print in Black Strong and Flexible. ><

It came out pretty well, but being able to try it out helped me work out a couple of design issues. First, whilst it looked pretty thick on screen, the spar connecting the two parts came up pretty thin in real life, so I thickened it a bit for the final version. Secondly, I rotated the head part of the cufflink 90° so that it would align with with the direction of my arm when worn. Here’s a render of the design done in cycles before ordering my final print.

Render2 ><

With my design changes made I ordered the metal version from Shapeways. I got it printed in their Polished Brass material. Here’s how it came out!

IMG_0939 >< ><

I’m rather chuffed with them.

, , , , , , , , , — May 29, 2015