How To Design A Spiral Vase

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In this tutorial I will show you how to design a spiral vase typical of type often 3D printed. At the end is also a link to my original Alibre file on Dropbox and be sure to check it out in the User Gallery

 

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1. First I start by drawing the side profile of the vase. This serves no other purpose other than to find a pleasing profile. Essentially the four nodes I create are joined by a spline as the flow of the spline is the same as that of a loft. The dimensions of the nodes will be used to create the loft profiles.

 

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2. Next I create the planes for the loft profiles. They are perpendicular to the Y Axis at 0, 50, 105, 150 as per the nodes in step 1.

 

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3. For the first profile I start by drawing a circle with the radius of the bottom node in step 1. Then I offset the circle inwards (in this case 6mm) and lastly create an array of spokes.

 

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4. Next I trim the sketch as per the picture.

 

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5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each plane using the corresponding node dimension for the outer circle diameter. Note: the offset amount for the inner circle can be varied i.e. the larger the outer diameter the larger the offset and the smaller the outer diameter the smaller the offset. This will create a more organic appearance the the ribs. Each sketch will now have 15 teeth each.

 

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6. You can loft the profiles as they are and achieve the following:

 

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7.For the following images I have hidden the planes. You will need to make sketches visible to create the guide curves. Guide curves are creates using the 3D Sketch tool. Once opening the 3D sketch tool click on spline. Select a vertex on one of the bottom sketch teeth, then move one sketch up and one tooth over, and so on on all four sketches. Be sure pick the same corresponding vertex on each tooth.

 

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8. Repeat step 7 for each tooth to achieve this. At this point you should have four 2D sketches and fifteen 3D sketches.

 

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9. Now you can create the loft. If you are not familiar with lofts you need to add the 2D sketches to the cross sections box and the 3D Sketches to the guide curves box. Note that sketches must be added sequentially.

 

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10. After the loft I added fillets to the underside.

 

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11. Next I added fillets to the ribs.

 

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12. Lastly I shelled the vase and then added fillets to the top.

 

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Hopefully you found this helpful. Be sure to download the original Alibre file here