Steampunk Easter Egg!

Celebrate your favourite egg-oriented occasions with this mechanically-inspired riveted ellipsoid!

Yes, my amazing friends, it's a steampunk-style egg-shaped thing that holds stuff, and is related conceptually in some degree to our recent strawberry friend. This one's a two-part container where the top slides onto the base, and is fastened with two stylish bolts.

I set myself a constraint on this one in terms of aesthetics - no cogs!  I really wanted to explore industrial textures without falling back to the easy comfort of sprocket shapes.  My favourite of all the details is the texture inside those vent things - that was a bit of detail that suddenly made an enormous difference to the overall feel of things.  I almost made the bolts into cogs, telling myself that wasn't part of the main design and thus exempt from the rules, but fortunately I stuck by my constraints and I ended up with a design I liked much better anyway!

The most interesting technical challenge with this model was keeping the angles on the details sensible for printing.  It's all very well having a hemisphere protruding from a face that's inclined upwards, but that won't work when the face is pointing down.  So, there are all sorts of angled faces and extrusions to give the impression of shapes while still remaining nicely printable.

Printing Tips

Designed for straightforward printing, no supports required.  As mentioned, all the details are constructed with manageable angles (for a good example of this, look at the angles of the vent planes on each face, and see how they vary depending on the face angle!)

The parts should be oriented for printing like so:

File Location

You'll find this on dropbox under 765 Steampunk Easter Egg

(Dropbox link post:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/dropbox-and-are-31697592 )

Further Thoughts

Oh, deadlines!  Easter looms and waits for nobody!  I was half-way through some other design stuff when I started this and realised that Easter was very close and the egg would need to be expedited if anyone was going to have a chance to print it.  So, those poor designs were knocked out of the way like so many skittles!  

Sorry, half-finished designs, I'll get back to you soon!  Right after I finish the other egg-oriented design I'm almost done with :P

Happy egg making!

xoxo

Sven.