Latest 3d print : Shatter Vase
I’ve been interested in Voronoi diagrams for a long time: I really like the organic cellular structure they create.
I ran across a set of pluigins for Maya called SOuP that allow for the ‘shattering’ of 3d mesh via a Voronoi algorithm. I set about to writing a Python script I could apply to any volumetric polygonal solid in Maya to apply this shatter (the by-hand process is over on my Mel Wiki), and this vase was the first usable version I came up with: I modeled the smooth “interior” section of the vase first, and then generated a slightly larger version which I ‘shattered’, and booleaned the two together. It is now a trendy art-piece in my bathroom window. For the pics with the blue-glow, I just dropped a small LED in there .
Note, it is not water-tight: Just for fun I filled it with water: There’s still some sloshing around now inside the print…
- Printed with ‘natural’ PLA on Makerbot Replicator, using “medium” settings in Makerware
- Extruded at 210 deg, HPB off
- 2 shells, 5% infill
- Printed in about 5.5 hours, weights 85g, which works out to $1.91 in filament cost (for a $45 spool).
You can download the .stl for printing over on Thingiverse
I had some other experimental prints dealing with Voronoi shattering that led up to this one, which you can see in the below image:
- The print on the far right was my first attempt: That was 12 hours in, before the printer stopped extruding
But it shows off some of the cool infill patterns and support materials: It was a little over 3″ cubed, had it finished. - The print 2nd from the right printed successfully: I did a full volumetric shatter on another smaller cube. I duplicated the object in Maya: One of the objects I did the process where I convert the wireframe to a polygonal solid via blobby-particles. the other object I strategically deleted different Voronoi chunks, and then merged the two together. The final version looks like random polygonal volumes held together by spider-webs.
- The remaining prints are unrelated, but make a nice backdrop


































