Sometimes, 3D printing needs to be precise and practical. And sometimes, it just needs to be fun, like the wood-cut puzzles your grandpa may have made in his garage. We'll be making similar puzzles but with a whole new dimension in order to take advantage of the power of 3D printing.
In addition to the basic 3D editing tools you've already learned about, Blender also includes some robust sculpting tools that enable editing objects with actions similar to drawing or building up clay. Because of its nature, sculpting facilitates a very organic modeling process.
There are a lot of sculpting tools available, and each one has a special use. The project in this book will use the most popular and useful of them to sculpt a simple model. This model will then be combined with basic editing outside of sculpt mode to create a 3D puzzle.
Since the editing tools can only work on existing objects, the first thing to do is create a new object:
Icospheres differ from normal spheres in that they don't bunch up at the poles. This will work out better for sculpting. But if viewed from the top (Numpad 7), the icosphere is not symmetrical from left to right. To fix this, follow these steps:
Tip
Applying rotation and scale doesn't have any visible effect on the model, but it will affect other things, particularly those related to the sculpt tools. Before applying rotation and scale, the object you see was actually another object modified with rotation and scale and could be undone. After applying it, the object you see is what the object actually is. It bakes in the changes. This is important because some actions, such as sculpting and some modifiers, are actually applied to the base object.