Hey everyone, I’m sorry I’ve been out of action for a whole week! I somehow managed to first hurt my rib cage merely by coughing,  and then, just in case that wasn’t enough,  poison myself with the very medications they gave me at the urgent care clinic to help me “feel better”.  Hmmm…  Anyway, I’ve been doing some light reading on how to model using surfaces in SolidWorks, just to pass the time away and learn two or three things. Then, I decided to try and create something with what I’ve learned so far, and that’s how I came up with this simple flower vase.  I know, some of you may have different ideas on how to do the same a lot easier or how to improve it, maybe some of your ideas don’t even include surfaces and I would love to hear them, so make sure to leave a comment for me here.  Just remember, I’m a beginner at this surfacing stuff, and I just wanted to practice surfacing, so go easy on me.

I wanted this vase to be just like one my husband gave me a few years ago, and that unfortunately broke. Although basically squared shaped, the walls of the vase are somehow curvy, so I began by creating a surface extruding an arc sketched on the Top plane, as you can see in the following image.

After that, I created an axis (Axis1) between two points in the lower edge of the surface. The idea was to use this axis to rotate the surface around it a few degrees, since the walls of my vase don’t precisely go straight.  For this purpose, I used the command Move/Copy Bodies, but only to rotate the surface, not to copy it. In the image you can see the selected surface in blue and its new position in a pale, almost transparent, shade of yellow.

The rest of the walls for the vase were created by patterning this first wall around Axis2, which is an axis I created in the intersection of the Front and Right planes. Notice that all these “walls” are simply surfaces that intersect each other and still need to be trimmed.

I trimmed the four surfaces against each other using the Trim Surface command. By selecting Mutual as the trim type, not only the four surfaces get trimmed as well as work as trimming tools themselves, but the result is also knitted together as one surface body in the end.  The purple faces are the ones that are being kept.

Next, I created a plane that goes through Axis2 and one of the top vertices of the vase. In this plane, I sketched a profile to help me model the top of my vase.

I wanted to create a surface by sweeping a sketch (the profile) using the upper edges of the vase as my path, only  problem is that these edges  do not rest in one plane, so what I did was to open a 3DSketch (Insert, 3DSketch) and convert those edges. Once I had my profile and path, I used the command Sweep Surface, as you can see in the following image. The swept surface is shown as a preview.

My vase has some indentations on the walls, and I wanted to recreate them.  With this idea in mind, the first thing I did was to offset one of the walls to the inside of the vase. It’s is hard to appreciate it, unless I hide the other faces, but maybe you can see the offset surface in the detail of the preview. It’s the one shaded in pale yellow.

I created a sketch on the front plane by offsetting the edges of the vase wall and used it to trim two of the four faces of the vase, the one directly in front of the Front plane and the one behind it. In the image, the surfaces in purple are the ones being kept.  Next, I created the same sketch in the Right plane and used it to trim the remaining two faces.

Once again, on the Front plane, I created a sketch by offsetting the one created in the previous step to the inside. I used this new sketch to trim the offset surface I had created previously. The part in purple is the one I’m keeping.

I used the Boundary Surface command to create surfaces to connect the wall of the vase to the trimmed offset surface, like you see in this image.

I did the same for the rest of the edges and then patterned all five surfaces (the trimmed offset surface included) around Axis2, as you see in the image.

At this moment, I had a total of twenty two surface bodies, so I decided to knit them together, using the Knit Surface command, but I didn’t try to form a solid just yet. After using the Knit Surface command, I had only one surface body in my folder.

If you look at it closely from the front or from the right, you will notice that the bottom of the vase is not really flat, so what I did was to trim the bottom using the Top plane as my trimming tool.  Once the bottom was flat, I was able to use the edges to create a planar face to close the vase at the bottom using the Planar Surface command. I knitted this new surface and the one I already had together afterwards.

Next, I applied a few fillets to soften the edges of the vase, and finally, used the Thicken command to make it into a solid by adding thickness to the surface. Notice that this is working for all these surfaces at once only because they are knitted together. You can add thickness to the outside, the inside, or to both inside and outside at the same time. In this case, I decided to apply the thickness to the inside of the vase.

So there you have it. It’s not perfect…

I’m still not so happy about how the fillets look like. The upper edge in particular seems to be extremely hard to fillet as it is. Nothing seems to work and my attempts so far have only produced strange looking corners.  I guess I need to do some more light reading…