Nesting boxes

00:00

In this video, we're gonna be creating these nesting organization boxes. These are great for keeping small parts separated, and when you're done, just go ahead and stack them up. The skills we're gonna be learning are the scale tool, the shell tool, some basic extrudes, fillets, and some basic object movements or manipulations. So let's go ahead and dive in. So right over here, you can see here are my boxes, and I'm gonna spin these around a little bit. You can kinda see what they're looking like. You can see there's, if you actually zoom in here, we can see there's a real tight.

00:29

a little gap here between the boxes. So these nest together and they're about the same size, but there's of course a small little gap between the two. So you can, you know, stack them all up, but then you have three different boxes. They're relatively the same size, which is great for keeping things organized and you know, keep your table neat for instance. Anyways, let's jump in and see how we create these. So first things first, let's go over here and say a new project or create a new project. And I'm gonna go ahead and choose a sketch. Start my sketch right over here.

00:58

And I wanted to start with a real basic thing right on that bottom plane or the top plane here. So right over here, I wanna go ahead and create a rectangle. So here's my rectangle. If you click on this little fly out here, I got a couple of options. I can choose center, diagonal, three point. I'm gonna choose the center rectangle and go ahead and click right here in the origin and drag it out. And then notice right down here at the bottom, it says the length. So I'm gonna type in 100 and hit tab on my screen.

01:25

And notice it zooms out to that size. Now notice this other one over here happens to be highlighted. I'm gonna type in 100 over there as well and hit enter. So now I've created a square. And we wanna then extrude that thing out, right? So if I hit E for extrude on my keyboard, I can actually click on this thing and I can say, hey, I wanna grab this thing here. I wanna just pull that up in space. In this case, I wanna put in 40 millimeters, type in 40, hit enter and there we have it. Click on that checkbox right there.

01:54

And now we've got this basic shape. Now, what I wanna do next is I wanna add some fillets to the outside of the shape, right? Because we just have a really basic little square box here or a rectangular box and I want to add some fillets. So let's go ahead and over here, you can of course, you can grab some of the different tools here on the left-hand side here. And you can also just click on an edge. Like if you click on an edge right here, I can click on the fillet, I can drag it in or out, right? So I can do that. If I wanna select some different edges here.

02:23

I could choose as many edges as I want, right? So I can choose this edge here. And notice that if you do that, it actually ends up being a separate fillet. So you don't really want that to happen, right? So over here, here is our history bar. Here's our fillet. Right click on it and say delete. We don't want that one. We actually wanna select all of the edges. So before we do the bottom ones, I wanna click on this edge here. I'm gonna hold down shift on the keyboard and I'm gonna spin this thing around. So I'm gonna choose all four of these edges here. So I'll spin it around again. Grab that edge right there.

02:53

and spin it around one more time here, grab that edge right there, okay? Now, if I just grab this little arrow here, I can push it in here, or if we push it the other way, it actually creates a chamfer, right? So if I drag it out, I'm gonna create a nice little fillet and eight millimeters looks pretty good to me. Click okay, there's my first fillet. Now, I'm gonna choose this bottom edge down here, click on that one there, and drag that one out. And notice because we've already created the fillets around the perimeter, it automatically brings that all the way around the perimeter of the part. So 10 millimeters looks fine there.

03:22

Click OK and now I've added these two fillets to my design and right over here. If you wanted to go back and modify those, you can go over here to the fillet command. Click over here, drag it down. So here's my fillet one. You can see here's my edges. In here is the edges that have been selected. If you want to add more, you can of course just click and add more here. You could clear them out and things like that. You can also come over here and type radius or the style of radius if you want to change that method or the size of the radius. All these things can be all changed right here.

03:50

in the history bar, right? But right now they all look pretty good to me. Same thing down here on the next one down. You can see it and modify as needed. Okay, now eventually we wanna shell these boxes, but I don't wanna do that quite yet because I want them to all have a uniform wall thickness. I want each of the boxes to each have a two millimeter thick wall. So if I created the wall now and then I scaled it, that scaled part, that smaller part, would have a thinner wall. So we don't wanna scale it quite yet. So first thing,

04:19

I wanna do now is to create a scaled version of this part. So over here, you notice we've got a couple of different transform tools over here. And one of them is scale, or just hit S on the keyboard. And by default, if you click over here, you can say, I can do a uniform scale or a non-uniform scale. So I wanna choose the uniform scale and I wanna choose this object right over here. Okay, so here's my items. And I'm gonna choose the body, right here from the list. So here's my body.

04:47

And as far as the scale factor, I want actually 0.95. Now I figured that's out ahead of time to make it kind of perfect. But 0.95 happens to work pretty well for this shape. So click okay there. And I wanna make a copy of it, right? I wanna actually want, I wanna bring another copy of that part. So I wanna keep the original and then make a smaller version that happens to be 0.95 or 95% of the size of the original one. Click okay and now I've got it. Well, of course I'm thinking, hey, where did this thing go? I mean, it's not even there.

05:17

Couple other things I can show you. Right over here, if you click on this little icon here, I can switch over here to appearance, and I can say show hidden edges. Click on that, and now you can see there's actually a part inside of the other part. Pretty handy, right? And if you want, you can see that here's the first, here's the new part here, body one, and here's the body one, right? So you need, of course, you can click on this and say hey, I wanna, you know, move it around, and stuff like that, and that's exactly what we wanna do. We wanna grab that new body, and we wanna drag it up.

05:46

above the old body, okay? So now I've got the old body with the new body which is slightly smaller. Now I wanna do the exact same thing one more time. This time, I'm gonna go ahead and choose this new body here and hit S on my keyboard for scale again, type in that .95, okay? Click on copy and hit okay. Right, and what that does is it did exactly the same thing. Here's my new body inside there, and so now it shows up over here. So you got body one.

06:15

And then you've got to copy one and two of the same body. Now, of course you can hide the old bodies, right? If you don't want to see these guys, so you're just only working on that one, turn them on, turn them off, whatever you want. But that one there, I want to move that one up above a little bit so that I can see each of the bodies. All right, so in there, there's my three different bodies and I'm going to switch back to, back over here to appearance, I'm going to say show hidden edges, I'm going to turn that off for right now. So you're going to see the three different bodies, pretty handy. Okay, now I want to shell, right? So,

06:44

Over here, as far as tools, I can come down here and I can click on Shell or H on the keyboard, click on Shell, and I wanna choose the face I wanna remove. I wanna choose that surface right there, the top. I wanna get rid of the top. I'm gonna type in two for two millimeters, and I'm gonna say shell that component out. Click done, away we go, right? Now let's go ahead and do it again. So again, I'm gonna hit H on the keyboard, which is Shell, click on that top surface here, two, boom. All right, same thing, click OK.

07:13

and then come up to the top one, choose that one there. Again, shell, hit H, choose the top surface there, two millimeters and boom. Okay, so now we've got all three of these done. You can spin these around, let's take a look at them, they all look pretty good. Now, we may wanna apply some different materials to these so you can kinda see which one's which, but what I'd like to do next is I wanna just kinda nest them together and see how they look, right? So a great way to do that is click on something like the front plane.

07:43

and I'm gonna click on section view. So I'm gonna slice these guys in half so you can see exactly what's going on here. And then let's just go ahead and just move them around. So I'm gonna just kind of zoom in and see where we're at. So click on this one here. Actually click on it over here. So I'm gonna click over here. I'm just gonna drag this thing down and actually nest it together. And you can see, hey, I've got this nice little gap, just pretty small gap. So of course you can modify that if needed. There's my first gap and notice the two tops of these two parts happen to line up perfectly.

08:13

You know, of course, I planned that a little bit, but it does look pretty nice the way that happens. And same thing over here is I can grab that next component here. That body right over here is what we wanna move. And let's go ahead and just kinda zoom out so we can see those arrows. And we're gonna bring that one all the way down there. Zoom in a little bit better so we can see. I just wanna bring it right to, so it's gonna basically sit inside that box.

08:38

Now click OK and notice over here, one thing I don't like is this happens to be just a tiny bit proud. We don't want that to happen, right? So we gotta fix that. I'm gonna go ahead and rotate this thing around. I'm gonna choose that surface right there. Of course, you can just grab it and just move it, right? And it moves it up or down if you wanna make it and see if you can modify as needed, right? And I wanna move it down 0.1 millimeters. Click OK, and that should bring everything.

09:06

right in line, so there it is, everything's perfect again. Now, of course, for your own design, you can make these boxes as big as you want. You can make the wall thickness as big as you want. You can add a little bit more clearance. You can change the colors, you can change the materials, whatever you wanna do, right? It's all up to you. But again, it's a pretty handy little way to think about using Shell, using some of these commands to create these types of boxes. I'm gonna go over here to modeling now and switch to visualization.

09:35

And over here, I'm gonna say, hey, let's apply some materials. So I'm just gonna drag and drop a matte material out to the outside one so you can see it's red. I'm gonna use, let's just use carbon fiber for the middle one, why not? And I'm gonna zoom down here. How about this silicone rubber color for the inside one? So that's pretty much exactly how we had it in the beginning of the design. So you got those three different boxes, they're all different colors and materials. Now you're ready to go ahead and.

10:04

you know, save these out. So you can come up here and go File, and you can say Export To, and you can save it as like an STL file, or a 3DMF file, things like that. And then, of course, you have three of these boxes that are all nested together, so you probably don't want to 3D print those like that because you're pretty much never gonna get them apart. So you do need to separate those boxes out when you actually get into the 3D print environment, but you will have separate entities there. Or you might even want to move those around here in Shapr3D so that you...

10:31

you know, have them kind of laid out how you might 3D print them actually on the build plate. But anyways, that is the nesting organization boxes. It's a pretty simple project, but it does allow you to learn about using the shell command and some of these other scale tools and things like that you can do in the design and get you thinking about how things nest together and what you can do. Now, if you were gonna injection mold these parts, you probably would like to add some draft. We did not do that in this one because we were kind of optimizing these for 3D printing.

11:00

Of course, if you're going to injection mold or something like that, and you want them to nest, you could probably make them all exactly the same size. But in this case, we got them 3D printed, and they're looking pretty nice. Thanks for watching.