Our project represents the spider-verse with the Spiderman logo. This model is composed of a dish, individual legs, and pieces for the eyes and mouth of the spider. The model was designed to fit within a 15x15cm area. The dish is designed with a support to help the model stand at a 75.00-degree angle. In this project, my partner, Danial Labunski, and I were tasked with designing a piece of 2D art in SolidWorks software. The end goal was to create identical designs while developing our teamwork and 3D modeling skills in the SolidWorks software. Start by taking the body of the spider (Rishitski_W_Body_D.3mf) and the right side eyepiece (Rishitski_Rpg_RightEye_D). Place the right eye into the right eye slot on the body.
For our 2D Art, we decided to go with the Spiderman logo. Just searching the ‘Spiderman logo’ on Google yields a large range of results. To narrow down our search we looked for logos that would allow us to make a model that would consist of multiple pieces and had sufficient space to create cutouts. In the end, we settled on this logo as our reference image:
Eyes + Mouth: Just sketching a spider would not meet the project requirements and would be boring and unoriginal. To add some complexity we hand-drew ‘eyes’ and a ‘mouth’ onto the body of the spider. This added a layer of complexity to our project by creating more pieces that we would have to work with while designing the model and when assembling the final project, it also made the design more interesting by creating a unique element that made the ‘art’ itself more appealing and interesting. You can see the sketch + relations for the eyes in Solidworks
below:
Dish: For the dish of this model we decided to offset the legs of the spider and arc the top and bottom contours. Originally we wanted to arc the top and bottom contour fairly aggressively to give the dish a distinct shape.
If you look at the before picture for the bottom arc. You can see the sketch on the top and the render on the bottom. In the render, you can see that the legs of the spider are coming off of the edge of the dish. Inherently this was a problem and we had to flatten out the arc more to ensure that the legs wouldn’t go off the edge of the dish. You can see how it looked after below.
We also had to edit the bottom arc after we printed the dish as we noticed a key issue. When we were printing we noticed that the arc was sagging and drooping in the middle because the arc was not aggressive enough– meaning that it would sink.
To fix this we had to go back and raise the arc. This would ensure that the arc wouldn’t sag the next time someone produced the dish part. You can see the After picture for the bottom contour below.
Stand: The biggest design choice we had to make involved making the stand for the dish. First we wanted to have the stand come out of the back of the dish, similar to two separate hooks or handles. It looked something like this:
This would not work because it's not possible for the 3d printer to print that. For a stand that could actually be printed the stand needed to come off the edge of the dish. We tried many different iterations using different parts of the base. We tried using the middle of the base, and even just the bottom.
In the end, we ended up going with making the stand come off the bottom edges and rotate down 75 degrees to create the stand that would give the dish the most support while not using too much filament. To aid with this, we made an extruding cut that went through the stand to reduce the amount of filament necessary for this model without sacrificing the structural integrity of the stand. We found that it would be easiest to replicate the geometry and offset it inwards for the cut and then follow up by fileting any sharp edges or corners made by the filet as rounded corners help provide structural integrity by removing any rigid joints on the model. The final stand ended up looking like this:
Color Scheme: At the end of the project we got to decide the colors/filaments in which we wanted to produce the final model in. Originally, we were thinking of going with a red spider on a black background, similar to the suit of Miles Morales:
We also tried creating color schemes where we had a white spider on a red background or a red spider on a white background
Instead we decided to go with something more creative to exaggerate the uniqueness of our model. For our final color scheme we decided to go with black for the dish, a white spider, and red for the eyes and mouth.
We came up with this color scheme by taking inspiration from the venom, black body and white eyes, and by taking inspiration from the colors on the album color of Drake’s new album ‘For All the Dogs.’ Below you can see Venom, the album cover, and our final colors:
Printing: When printing the dish we noticed that the bottom arc of the dish was sagging. Obviously, this is not ideal as the form of the dish was slightly deforming. To fix this we went back into our sketch and raised the arc so that when printing the model in the future the arc will come out as intended. This goes to show that you cannot account for everything when designing something in SolidWorks and that there will be times when you will need to print something, see how it comes out, and adjust your final design to fix any issues that may arise. You can see the final SolidWorks sketch for the 2D Art below:
The author marked this model as their own original creation.