Wall Clock Part 1: Concept Design

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Hi everyone, welcome to this Shapr3D tutorial series. This project we are going to dive deep into the world of product design specifically optimized for 3D printing. Over the course of this three-part series our goal is not just to make something pretty but understand the real world and practical mechanics of

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additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping, 3D printing. We'll use Shapr3D to ideate, model, iterate and adapt the design. And this iterative process is vital because we will have to print, check, iterate, adapt over and over in order to dial down the perfect fits and dimensions.

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Before we open a new workspace, let's talk about why designing for 3D printing requires a non-traditional way of design. So traditional manufacturing methods like injection molding or CNC milling have very strict rules regarding, for example, draft angles, uniform wall thicknesses, or similar. And with 3D printing, we can

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break some of those rules, which allows us to be more creative, have a little bit more freedom in our design choices. 3D printing itself will come with their own quirks and constraints. I'll just quickly mention overhangs or structural weaknesses. So we have to understand the material and the process in order to produce and create a good working

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product. So during this process, we will talk about those pitfalls or those challenges as they come along. So how do we choose the right product to demonstrate the concept? And what we want is we want to bridge between design and physical hardware. So a wall clock, a classic wall clock gives us

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creative freedom to explore shapes and sizes, but also it needs to ground us into the physical world by using a ready-made clock mechanism that needs to fit in there and make the clock work. So we need to adhere to physical requirements. We need to build a 3D model that can house the mechanism and in the end create a working clock.

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that we can proudly display on our walls. Alright, so let's jump into some inspiration. I created a little board which might also kickstart your ideas and visions. For me, I really like to use some sort of cavity, some sort of negative curvature and big bold clock hands.

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So let's jump into a quick sketch and quickly bring the idea to paper. So I really like this three-dimensional shape that kind of comes out of the wall instead of the classic two-dimensional clocks that are on the market today. And I would also like to play a little bit with the clock face and the hands to give a classic view from the front.

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but as soon as you look at it from a different perspective or angle the three dimensionality of the product shows. Alright, I think this is the vision and let's jump into Shapr to see how we make that vision reality. Alright, so now we are in a new workspace. So for the workspace setup I always have snapping on all the snapping tools and we are working in millimeters.

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And on the right here I can show and hide the history which currently is empty as are the items on the left. And for the quick ideation session that we are going to do I will not be bothered with my workspace tidiness let's say so I won't be creating folders or renaming the structure and also the history will be a little bit messier than

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usual but this is the nature of uh ideating. So let's start with a new sketch on the base plate and we are going for a circle and let's just estimate how big the circle should be. Let's do a 5 centimeter 50 millimeter diameter and just exit the sketch and we are trying to be as simple as possible with our

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tools and features. So we'll start with just extruding this up. So as mentioned, I won't be really checking the size and the dimensions. What I really want is to get an overall feel of the three dimensionality of the product that I have envisioned and sketched. But now I need to transfer that into the into 3D. So this is why

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I'm more looking for the overall shape and the aesthetics of the product and how I can create that in the 3D space and not be too bothered on the exact dimensions which we'll get to later. So I'll just go by eye and make sure that the feeling I get from it is the correct one and the overall proportions are right for me or feeling right.

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So this is my core volume. Let's use this rim in order to create an offset. So what we want is this tulip shape. And I'll just create a big offset here. And then we'll just push this down as far as we think it should. I think this should be the frame or the ring.

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And now I forgot to boolean these, so let's just go into our extrusion and then the result should be a Union with this original body here. Click done. Now we have one single body. And now let's just continue molding the shape as we see fit. So for example, here with those direct modeling tools with the fillet, let's just click on this edge and then create a big fillet.

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in order to dial this tulip shape down. Let's create a fillet that's this size. And then also what we want is to kind of round these two edges. So round this size. And here these snapping tools are helping because we are basically using full numbers. So for example, this thickness here is five millimeters.

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And then now I know that this radius is 2.5 and it will be a full radius. So these are the small little helpers that help while being creative and be fast with my iterations. So again, let's now turn our attention into the center of the clock shape. So I'll again create an offset of this frame here or this edge. And then now I want to be a little

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smaller here so let's go like this and then we're going to push this down as far as we want and you could also change the display mode to X-ray there you can see inside the model and see through it so you can check what exactly you're doing so we're going to push this down around this

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And again we're using these quick edit tools in order to create another big fillet. So it should be almost going all the way to the edge. Again, I can change the shader mode to shaded in order to see the shape more clearly. Also, I can change some of these options, for example, showing edges. So this way the edges are not interfering with my impression of the whole shape.

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And if I want I can even click on Zebra surface analysis and then check how the surfaces are interacting with one another. Let's go back to shaded. And I'll also just show the edges again. I want to round out this part here as well. Let's give that a big radius. And so now I have this transition of concave to convex, which was my goal. So the cool thing is now

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We still have all our history. So our first extrusion and we can go down and for example here change the distance and make that for example bigger. And our design will still be totally working. So technically I can just use this and dial in the right dimensions. We have a...

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another sketch, which is the offset. So I can make that bigger as well. If for example, I feel that's too small and you see it's quite easy. Will still keep all the features and every design decision that you made, but you still be able to update shapes or update dimensions at a later stage. So that's what I like about that process is just create a shape and create something on the screen.

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and you will be able to change and adapt and ideate on the go. Alright, now we have a finished clock body but it's not yet looking like a clock so in order to for us to really understand the final shape and the final design we definitely need to add some hands, clock hands so we can check if it is the right direction and it matches that

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vision that we have in mind. So in order to do that, I'll select the main body. Then we are already in the move and rotate tool. So let's click copy and just move it up one and down one, which means zero millimeters. And it just creates a copy. So you'll see that the body is zero two is duplicated. Just click away and we can hide our original body and we'll work.

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on the copy. We can also just highlight this and click isolate, which does the same thing, but I just hit the original body. So next I'm gonna select all these surfaces, just left the lowest one, the base plate basically alone. And we're gonna use the already selected tool, which is Offset face. And I'll move down and

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offset this for about 4 millimeters. So what this does, it gives me a volume to play around or change, which is offset of the original so it doesn't interfere. So 4 millimeters, that's good. Just click somewhere to accept. And then now we are going to click this lower surface that we didn't change and click on Shell. So we'll just

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create a 2mm shell, click somewhere to accept. And now when we go to a section view from the side you will be able to see that it's hollow and we created this 2mm shell around our main body. So if we now unhide the main body so now you can see better what we created. So we have a 4mm offset between the original body and the outer face of the shell.

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and then we basically put 2mm back on as a thickness for this shell. Now we're going to use this volume to create some quick clock hand designs. So let's hide the main body and also deselect section view and let's quickly go from the top and create a sketch. So go to sketch and since we're already in the top view it

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understand that we want to sketch from the top. Let's go and click on circles. So we're going to create a small 10mm circle here in the center. And then we are taking another circle and putting it somewhere along the y axis and also have that 10mm wide. And let's connect those with two lines.

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And even though we are doing ideation and quick sketches and quick modeling, we can still use constraints in order to make changes later on easier. So let's go and add some quick constraints. So first of all, let's use the 10 millimeter here for a constraint that already makes some of this green. And then the second thing I'm going to do is use the length and

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that fixes the distance between the circles and we still have to click on those two to make them tangent. And I think those are already tangent and that fixes everything in place. So now we can either go in here and change the length or in here to change the width. We then can also trim away the center elements or these inner

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parts of the circle in order to create a full final pill shape. And that's it for the sketch and we can exit. So now in order to extrude this whole sketch, I'm going to hide our offset body. Then just click on the sketch and then extrude that upwards. And in order to now intersect and see how far we need to offset or extrude, we can unhide our offset body.

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and then as soon as we move something we are going to cut away but we can change that to intersect and that gives us our final body that we need to or want to create. Also gives us a secondary body that we don't need but we can now just go ahead and hide that one or delete it. Now if we go into our items we can unhide the original body and you'll be able to see that we now created this

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minute hand and it has this 2 millimeter offset and 2 millimeter thickness. And now we can even go ahead and give that a small chamfer in order to make some final adjustments. If we hide the edges and then we can also go to our visualized shader which adds a little bit of shadow to that model we are able to see our vision taking shape. So that's what I want. I want to kind of have

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non-traditional clock hands with these three dimensional shape or three dimensional surface, which changes according where you look at the clock from. All right. So now that we know how this works, we can do this one more time. And now the direct modeling tools of Shapr really are going to shine because what we can do is we can just highlight our hand body and it already selected move rotate. So we're gonna again, highlight copy.

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and move that up around, let's say three millimeter in order to create some space, then deselect copy. Now we're going to move our center point into the center line. So this is the C axis. So it already snaps into that. And we can just rotate along, let's say 90 degrees. It's a classic clock shape. And that's our new body that you can work.

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Now since one of those handles needs to be smaller or thinner or some other differentiation factor in order to say which one is the minute handle, let's see how we can change the design or change the shape in order to differentiate between minutes and hours. So I think usually the lower one is the hour handle or hand and the larger one is the minute hand.

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So let's choose our original one for the hour hand. And I think I'm going to just try and make the overall length smaller. So let's try that. I'm going to click this surface over here and then go to move and rotate and see what happens if I just push this in. So you see that the direct modeling tools really work hard here. We could just type in 15 in order to have a nice clean number.

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and you see that now our hand is shorter but also the chamfer that we created didn't really update but that's not an issue we can deal with that so that's fine we can just keep it at that space so now as the last step let's deal with our missing chamfer there is a few ways we can do it but i think the easiest way is to just select the chamfer that we already did and move them down

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in the history and now it updates already our chain but now we lost the chamfer on our copy so what we can do is just go in here edit the edge and then add another one here so highlight one edge of our new hand and then click done so now we finished updating the size of the hands now we have

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all our elements that we need. One final step we can do is go to visualization and then select a few colors that we want our product to be like. So really like the combination between orange and white for example. So let me just put some orange material on to the handles and to change the body material we can also go in

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to the material that it's in. So go to the default material, edit and change the style or type of material to the same one. And that just updates all the settings. And now we can change it to a very light gray in order to keep the contrast and then click done. So now we have a really nice visualization of our final design. And I really like that.

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from the front, it is a classic watch layout, let's say, or clock layout. And then as soon as you turn your head, you watch it or look at it from a different angle, you will see the change in three dimensions. So that's really nice. And any time we want to change or edit anything, we can go either into our history and find the setting or feature that we want to edit and then

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give that a different setting or different value and you see that it already updates everything. So that the beauty of this direct modeling tool set that we have available. And in the next step, we are going to go through the process of bringing this design into the real world with real world dimensions and parts that we need to recreate and adhere to.