By day, my Product Design work is purely digital. I work in the limitless realm of Software.
By night, I’ve been experimenting with Physical Product Design, modelling and 3D printing all sorts of useful widgets.
The cross-over between Digital and Physical worlds is lots of fun.
So when Lior, my 8 year old son, presented me with a drawing of a character he imagined, I had the idea to try to bring it to life as a physical object!
I’ve tried modelling on a pancake screen, and for really technical designs with precise tolerances, that works great. But when it comes to quickly bringing to life a unique, messy, interesting character, I jump into VR.
Using the Valve Index and Microsoft Maquette, I 3D modeled Lior’s flat drawings. Modeling in VR is a game changer. It allows me to design spatially, physically moving around my room and around the character, drawing and shaping in three dimensions.
Then I export the model, and open it in Blender, to clean up and properly scale.
The result gets exported as an .stl file, and sliced by UPStudio, before being sent to my Upbox to be made real!
For the finishing touch, I wanted to paint it. To help me know which colours to use, Lior recreated his original drawing on his iPad.
I’m not the world’s greatest painter, but I gave it a good go. Here’s how it turned out!
