Juicebox holder

[jsc]

I decided to bite the bullet and learn Autodesk Fusion 360 for real. There's no better way to learn a tool than to use it, so I used it to design a juicebox holder (holds juice boxes/bags, which prevents kids from squeezing them and making a mess). My first attempt is at http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:474487, but I just finished a redraw as a single T-spline form:

juicebox.png (126.7 KiB) Viewed 16084 times

Fusion 360 looks to be very powerful, and is free for hobbyist use.

[jimc]

yes i saw your original on thingiverse. how is the 360? does it seem like an easy to learn software? easier than autocad i would hope.

[jsc]

I have never used AutoCAD. Like all CAD programs, Fusion 360 has a learning curve, but there are plenty of videos to help you get started. It seems more powerful than Autodesk's introductory offering (123D Design), and includes T-Spline bodies, which give you a way to do organic forms for industrial design very easily. I believe they have a T-Splines plugin for Rhino3D. They are like NURBS, but somehow "better".

Now that I have a better understanding of its user interface, I think it will be taking its place as my modeler of choice.

[jimc]

thats cool. yes autodesk does make a tspines plugin for rhino. i have never used it though. i did watch one video on it once just to see what a tspline was and it just left me sort of confused. i should really look into some more.

[markb]

I did not know this was free for personal use. Thanks for the info.
You do have any links of videos you found helpful.

[jsc]

I would start here: http://fusion360.autodesk.com/resources

Then try likely searches on youtube to fill in the gaps, or if you're trying to do something in particular that you can't figure out. There are several walkthroughs where they design a complete object, and those can be helpful, too. But mainly, I'm just picking a form (like my juicebox thing) and bulling along trying to get it made, and that ends up teaching me a lot.

For example, my juicebox form has solid handles, and the inside surface follows the outside at a 1.6mm (4 perimeters) offset. I tried several attacks before I got something workable:

Create a cube of the appropriate dimensions with three way symmetry.
Crease the top and bottom.
Draw an arc for the rough path of the handle on the XY plane using a circle, project, and trim tools.
Bridge portions of the left or right side along the arc to form the handle.
Sculpt the handle to make it look okay, and make sure that no overhang is much more than 45 degrees.
Clear symmetry and re-establish it for length/width.
Sculpt the body to get the mouth flare and foot corner bulges.

At this point, you could just shell off the top and be done, but that leaves you with holes through the interior of the handles, and that's not what I wanted. The solution I came up with was to remove the top off the box, leaving you with a 2D surface and thicken up that surface. Now you have the same thing as the shelled surface, but it is still all in the same form object, so you can unweld edges around the handle holes so you can then delete them. Then you have to patch up the holes left in the interior surface, and I found that you can either use "fix hole" in the sculpt environment, or create patches in the patch environment. The second route ended up with a smoother surface, so I went with that.

[willnewton]

T-splines is available for Rhino 4 and 5. I have it and even had formal training with it, but I do not use it much at all. It is a cool addition, but not super useful day to day for my needs.

If you specialized in designing organic shapes as a full time job, it is very nice, but you can get quite organic with Rhino as well. It does take some mental flexibility to get used to the workflow.

[pyronaught]

I should make one of these-- I have a very mess-prone 2 year old to test it on. There needs to be a mechanism to keep the juice box planted inside the holder though, otherwise the kid will simply remove it and resume squirting it everywhere. If there is a way to make a mess or break things, a 2 year old will find it. My kid already cracked the sliding plexiglass door on my M2 enclosure. I knew when I was building it I should have put spring stops at the bottom in case the door free falls-- knowing full well it would be the toddler who creates that situation. I'm sure his next plan of attack will be to pull the USB plug out near the end of a long print-- need a way to lock that thing in too. I was wondering if that would wreck the job or if the software would just go in a holding pattern and resume once it is plugged back in?

[jdacal]

Hey jsc you might be able to include that print in the kitchen contest at Thingiverse.

[jimc]

glad you mentioned that challenge. i didnt know about it. i just submitted my banana stand