Design an organic chair

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Hello everybody, and welcome to this furniture design tutorial in which I'm going to show you a very easy way how to build such a complex and organic looking chair in Shapr3D. I will run you through the whole process about first starting creating all the sketches, which we need, highlighting also Shapr3D's unique ability to create sketches and then move them around in 3D space, which is extremely useful.

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Further, a big focus of this exercise is going to how easy it is to create the shell. So we'll first create a spherical body, then create the sketches, project them onto the surfaces, shell everything. So we have now a cut out part, and then use a really smart idea of using the push and pull command to simply

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remove the excess material via push and pull extrude, if you want to say. And then of course, I run you through all the rest, adding nice details to the design, for example, like seams. So when we then bring everything into the visualization, we have appropriate amount of geometry, which we can then texture and create beautiful looking product presentations. And with all that said, let's do it.

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Let's start with a new empty design. Before we continue, we want to make sure that snapping is all turned on, and we use centimeter as our unit system. Let's go to the front view and move everything down a little bit. And we're going to create our first sketch that's going to build that spherical body. Let's click Sketch. We will start with an ellipse and on the Z axis, I start drawing straight down to define the major axis.

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And then the minor axis, press Escape to start drawing the ellipse. Then we specify the minor axis to be 62 centimeters and the major axis will be 70 centimeters. Now, because everything started to be drawn on the Z axis, the center point has a coincident constraint on the Z axis.

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I can only move the ellipse straight up, which is perfect because now I can select the ellipse center point and the sketch origin and specify the distance to be 102 centimeters. I know this value that the center has to be at this position. So when we create a seat, the seat isn't too high or too low. Beautiful. Now the next step, we're going to draw a line.

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Again, on the Z axis, straight down, starting outside, ending outside. Press Escape. If you now look at the endpoints, you will see that the white dots have a dark dot inside. And that is because we, by drawing on the Z axis and ending on the Z axis, we coincident constrained the endpoints to the Z axis. And that we need to...

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delete. So we can select these points and delete them. To continue, we can use the Trim command and simply remove the pieces, which are on top and the bottom. And then we go to the Move command, select the line, select the ellipse. And we, I need to trim this one more time correctly. And then we can rotate everything.

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perfectly through the center of the ellipse. Look at that. Nice and clean. 12 degrees. And that is it. We have now actually the elliptical body with a perfectly rotated center line. And with that, we can exit the sketch, select the sketch profile, half one, select this line, that is actually going to be our...

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Revolve Axis, and then we select the Revolve command. And there is actually now our spherical body. In the Items view, we can turn the visibility off for this body. For the moment, we don't need it anymore. Let's go to the front view. And now we're going to create a second sketch. This sketch is going to define how we are going to cut this solid body open. We will start

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with the spline and the control version. Somewhere on top, we click, go in, click, go down, click, go further down, click, go on up, click and go to the outside and click and press Escape and Escape to stop the spline drawing command. We can now move these points around and sculpt, I like the way how we would like.

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this chair to open. One thing to note, do not bring the spline over the ellipse or too close, because this way the backrest will be very skinny or non-existent. There we are. Let's say something like this. We can define actually, or adjust.

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the outline of the sketch and perfect it later. After we projected everything onto the spherical body and trimmed it, thanks to the history. So this does not have to be perfect right now. We will add one line, maybe slightly at an angle on top. That's actually the border where on top we trim everything off. And now we are also adding where...

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the bottom part will be opened. Let's say like this. I make this a little bit bigger, so it's easier to see. With this done, we can exit the sketch. The first sketch we don't need to see anymore. We can now show the body and we're going to project these sketch elements onto that spherical body. To do this, let's go to Tools, select Project. Then we select

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our three sketch elements, and then select the sphere. You see the sphere is violet and has the target sign. That's perfect. The projection result will be an edge on the face. Click Done. And we can hide that sketch. There we are. You see? Perfect. This is really good. What we can do now is clean everything up a little bit. We can select all these extra

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edge bits here and delete them. So now if we go look from the side, there we can see, this is actually the chair, shell we will remain and this is what we will lose. Just to make my point, let's go back to Sketch 2 and move everything.

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a little bit, and then there you will see how when we exit this one, everything was updated according to how we adjusted that sketch. Now in the next step, this is actually the fun modeling trick. We're going to shell this body. Shell, double click the part, and then go 8 centimeters to

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the inside. While we're in Site view, click on Section view. And now there we can see how we also have these edges on the inside. We actually do not need those. So delete them. We exit Section view, and then we change our view to the other side. Go to Back view in this case, Section view, and then we select the other half.

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of these projected lines and delete. Now what we can do is we can select this area we would like to remove. And then with the push and pull command, we start cutting in. And minus eight is all we need. Press Enter, turn the section view off and there it is. So you might ask yourself, why did we go into the section view?

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and the inside twice to remove the lines. We simply help the software this way. The inside was a clean revolve surface and the outside, that was the surface we detailed. Now, to prove my point one more time, let's go back to the sketch. And here is this line and move everything a little bit around. And there you can see how now everything beautifully.

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updates. That is the reason why I said, don't worry. Everything that we draw here right now does not have to be perfect. We can perfect everything after we created the three-dimensional result. The beauty of this process of shelling and then the push and pull removing the surface we don't need, is that actually these

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rim surfaces we have here, which I'm selecting, are all perpendicular to these other two edges. So with this done, we can now go ahead and start styling everything a little bit. These corners here, I select, and then I round those to be nice and comfortable. We can

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In this case, I used 18 centimeters. I will select this inner edge and that's going to define the upholstery. And I will go with a radius of 6 centimeters. So later when I'm adding materials, it will look like a 2 centimeter thickness for the shell and then comes 6 centimeters of material for the fabric. Perfect. This looks actually pretty good.

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We can keep everything this way. At this point, we can go ahead and start drawing the legs. I will start actually sketching kind of like the way how I might want the legs to look. With this spline command, I'm just drawing a three-point spline, kind of like a nice arc. And then with this spline command,

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from the ground up, I draw a line up, go inwards, and then I go back trying to hit the chair and press escape and escape and exit the sketch. The beauty of Shapr is that I can now select, for example, these sketch elements, go exit, go to a bottom view, and then I start rotating.

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these sketches and move them into the position where I want them to be. I can go to Transform and Move, and then select the back leg and rotate this a little bit and move this to somewhere else. So this is like super intuitive. Now, because these sketches are on a plane, I can...

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click the sketch and there you can see now I'm editing the sketch on its own grid. This looks really great.

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To really know if these leg sketches are perfect, I need to have a three-dimensional body produced. So let's do that. Let's start with the front leg. Actually, before we do this, maybe to make things a little bit easier, I will select the back leg, exit the sketch, and then I go Mirror. I do not want to keep the original and simply bring this other leg over to the other side. So now I have both sketches kind of like on.

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I like the right side. Back to that original task. Let's select this front sketch, exit the sketch, and then we will add a plane on curve at a point. I will drag this one to the bottom. And then I will select the sketch, the back one, and do exactly the same and make sure this is also at the bottom.

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Now with this, we created a construction plane that is perpendicular to these curves. And on that construction plane, I can add a sketch.

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At the center point where actually this sketch intersects with the leg sketch, we add the circle two centimeters. And then I do exactly the same also on the other construction plane.

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There we are. Beautiful. Now we can select one cross section or circle profile, and then select the according spline for the leg and perform a sweep comment. Let's do the same on the other one.

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You see, I work very logical, one step after the next step, and I group them. Because in the history now, I also here have a visual order. I can see what I worked on. I made the planes, I made the profile sketches, and then here I created the swept bodies. Now I will hide this first body we created. Then the trick...

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Now to create this beautiful fluted shape for the leg is I'm going to select the...

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edge of the swept body, go to Scale. And I want to use the Uniform Scale and simply scale this up. And look at that. This is how easy it is to create such a complex looking shape. So the swept command created this beautiful leg along this kind of S-curve. And then with the scale command, we change the...

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cross-section in a very linear way. Now we can highlight actually, or show the first body again. And the Scale command is captured here. We can then go back to the Scale command and click on it and adjust those to play with this a little bit more. It's pretty cool.

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because these sketches can be freely moved around, we can go ahead and I'll go to the bottom view. I need to figure out which sketch is this one. That is the correct one. Click Exit Sketch. And when I move this sketch plane around and rotate it, you see everything follows. This is just fantastic. Here,

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The way how I modified this made the lag not 100% go into the base. And now I adjusted that. Thanks to the amazing history. We can now double click and select these two bodies. And then we make a copy via the Mirror command to the other side.

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Because now we can go ahead and say these legs, together with this shell, reunion together, one piece. Now we have these new edges, which we can then fill it.

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I fill it actually the front and the back individually. So I have a little bit more of a control if one fillet should be bigger and one fillet, for example, should be smaller. This looks really good. I'm going to clean up my scene a little bit to make selecting elements easier. So I am selecting all the sketches and then

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put them onto one sketch and this way, everything is nicely in one folder. And I can simply show and hide that folder and through that, show and hide all the pieces inside, instead of just selecting piece by piece. The legs are kind of nearly done. We have these rounded ends, well, look like a flat surface, but I would like this to be more spherical end.

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So I left click to the right side, simply select the edges and can zoom in a little bit, fillet this.

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I do this, so it's nearly a sphere and it has a small flat surface. Because we're onto these surfaces later in the Vizu, we can then add another material. To add a little bit more of realism and modeling finish, we can select these edges, which are outside of what should be the shell.

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and then add a tiny fillet.

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I would like this to be.

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0.5 of a centimeter should be not too big. And to have a nice transition between the fabric surfaces and then the plastic shell surface, I'm going to add a little bit of a seam along these edges. In Shapr3D, just go to a side view. Then we go to Sketch and you see that actually

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Wherever we have these edges of our body intersecting with the sketch plane, we get intersection snapping points. And onto there, let's create a circle 1 centimeter. Then we can select the circle sketch profile, select the sweep path elements.

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and then perform a sweep command.

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There we are. Now it's a tiny detail, but this actually, when we add materials, et cetera, really adds quite a lot of nice realism.

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Such a chair also needs an ottoman. So let's quickly build an ottoman. I go to the side view, turn on section view, because now I can see roughly where my hip would be, where my legs come out. That is perfect. I will go to the sketch. I will on the X axis, draw a horizontal line, one line straight up and press escape, escape, double click everything, make sure it's horizontal vertical. Then I will use the arc command. Click.

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and click and make another arc and click and escape. The first arc, the top one, there I would like the arc to be tangent, sorry, not tangent, perpendicular to this line. And we can do this by adding a 90 degree angle constraint between the line and the arc.

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What we can then do is, as you can see, play with kind of like the shape of these arcs. And that, well, if we go ahead outside in the sketch, create then a revolved body, we can play them basically how we would like this to look.

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Now, for example, the top is a little bit thicker. We can bring this over. Now the top is a little bit thinner. We can bring the lower part in. So we have a nice, not too big proportion. This looks pretty good. Beautiful. Section view off. There we are. We can round the lower one quite big. And then the top one, we round too.

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To make this look quite nice, a little bit more like fabric, we can play with the tangency weight here a little bit. Push this up. Cause there's like foam inside and we just press it over it. And in a similar way, how we created that seam on our first piece, we're going to do the same on the second piece. Let me show a fun trick. We are...

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selecting the sketch, and then all the features that define this ottoman, and then we move this in front of the sketch that created the seam. So now the ottoman is created before we built the seam, because now inside the same sketch, when we select it, we can simply add the seam here to the ottoman. And then we do the same thing. Select the...

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Sketch Profile, select the circular part, do a sweep body. Since this is circular, we could also have selected the axis and did a revolve. Command. There we are. Now we're ready to add materials. Let's go to the Viso. First, let's make this look quite nice. We'll go to Gradient Mode, click on the cog.

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We will rotate this a little bit to in this case, 55. So I get a nice drop shadow onto the piece. And then for the background color, we select the standard cyan color and go to the center in the color field to make this less strong. Great. Click Done. Then let's go to materials. The...

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Standard material, let's say it should be a nice glossy ABS. We can just drag this onto it, click the material. We make this white there. And now we can select on the Ottoman, the top three surfaces for the upholstery. We click Change, and then we go to Fabric. And I will select

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the wool material, actually on the felt. Let's go over the felt, drag it onto it. We can play with the scale a little bit and make this on purpose a little bit bigger. So it's easier to see. And then I will give this nice cyan color. So it pops nicely. To colorize now the rest of the chair, we can go ahead and select all the individual faces we need. There we are.

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the seam and everything for the chair, where we have the fabric. And we're nearly done. And then click on Change and select the felt material. There we are. This one was not selected. This one too. And I must have selected here the wrong surface.

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There. Beautiful. There we are. Everything is nearly done. Maybe just the base. So the tip of our legs from the left to the right side, I select, and then go in face mode. Here I go, change, I go to plastic, scroll down.

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I would like this to be a silicone rubber in terms of color material and finish. I will go with this cyan color again, but then go more to the darker tone. Now this is on the ground. That's going to be dirty. But I don't want this to be too black. It should actually go with the rest. And ladies and gentlemen, we are done.

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This is how easy it is to build such a complex looking piece of furniture in Shapr3D.