R2-D2 Snowflake by Shadowninja24

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

I started off wanting to make this a small weekend project, but I was wrong. Since I saw this contest I have been playing around with BlocksCAD for days. First I wanted to make a simple shaped snowflake, then a little more custom R2-D2 snowflake. After more consideration I thought, why not add more and more to it. The center symbols spin in a group and the small one in the center.
Here I have a video of the snowflake spinning in action. https://youtu.be/QhaKaAw_m2Q
You can check it out at BlocksCAD here: https://www.blockscad3d.com/community/projects/72980
Here I have an R2-D2 Snowflake with the Galactic Federation Symbols as well as a Rebel Alliance Symbol in the middle. I used an extensive amount of blocks and hours to make this come to life. I began with R2-D2, as that was my first idea. All my shapes were made with cubes at the very beginning, from the body to the head, I just removed pieces over and over to form a rounded shape. I realized that I should watch all the BlocksCAD videos to fully understand the program (Which I'm happy I did) only to find out I can make rounded cubes using the union block. From there I went ahead and created R2-D2. At first all of my code was in just one long set of blocks, but the video taught me more about modules and how to organize and separate my code. I asked my high school teacher to print it out for me and I have images of the print.
I have a few images of my snowflake printer. It is not perfect, there is some stringing and maybe have to calibrate the printer a little. Along with my print pictures, my code pictures from left to right show different groups of modules grouped together to from a part of the snowflake.
Code Image 1: Is the main control system where I can scale the object as well as change the number of sides for all my circular shapes. My uploaded file is set to 100 sides for more accuracy.
Image 2: Contains a lot of removal for the main body to cut out all of the pieces of R2-D2. Where I first began to make long cylindrical rectangles instead of just rectangles. There is a lot of difference Set Ops used, plus unions.
Image 3: This is the head, it took a little time to make the rounded, triangle like rectangles because they were a little different and making sure every piece lined up took some time.
Image 4: The Galactic Federation may have been the most difficult part of this entire project. I needed to use two loops in order to get this to work. At first I wasn't sure of what to put in the center of my snowflake so from here on out I used a test space/project area in order to test out what I should design and how to implement it before actually placing it in my main project. Afterwards I had to go back and implement yet another symbol and the spinning system.
Image 5: The Rebel Alliance also took me a little while to make, although after the Galactic Federation symbol, things became easier. I wasn't sure how to make an oval so I used a flattened cylinder in order to form it and just extended it.
Image 6: This is the bars for the spinning system and the base circle. I had to make a few test prints with a little cube to make sure it would spin and I found that these dimensions were perfect.
The rest of the pictures are images of the final design. The files are all with sides of 100 for the highest accuracy. Thank you for checking out my snowflake! If you have any questions let me know.