Creating “animals”

joseph_newcomer

I have two students. The younger, age 11, wants to make new Lego accessories. That’s easy. Found a tutorial on making Lego blocks with all the dimensions.

The older student, 14, is more difficult. She wants to “create and print animals”. This is beyond my ability. OnShape may even be the completely wrong tool for doing this. Any suggestions? Links to tutorials? I’ve spent hours watching surface modeling tutorials and none of them would help me model, say, a cat, let alone a dragon (she has mentioned dragons as a goal)

MichaelPascoe

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Here is a custom feature for making LEGO's:
Bricks
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/573b8871e4b0fddafb4e953e/w/3482dc4c7b56051dbbecde32/e/a3e6fde07829a53a3ae8451e…

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The easiest way to make animals will be to learn Blender or another mesh based cad software.

To do organic shapes well in Onshape you need to master surfacing, not just get by with it. The reason for this is because Onshape isn't made for organics and is more mechanically inclined. Because of this, it is extremely difficult to make organic shapes. That said, it is possible. The best way to master surfacing is to work through the entire Advanced Surfacing Pathway. Once you master that, you should have the basics down for how to manage surface creation as well as how surfaces meet and their surface quality. A tool that will be useful to avoid having to create tons of guide sketches, will be FreeformSpline by Evan.

Here is an example of a (terrible surface quality… 😅) horse head in Onshape.
There are better ways to make this, for example by using Evan's freeform spline, but this should be an ok starting point to learn from.
Knight - Chess Piece
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/7dbe152c0ceadd42bff627f4/w/e255b1492f0387cb85ac5423/e/8616b7051d…

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