Use this pineapple from the hit SpongeBob animated series to hold all the office trinkets you desire, such as paper clips, binder clips, and rubber bands! This is part of a set of four SpongeBob-themed office supplies, and while this page focuses specifically on the pineapple, the rest of the print files have been uploaded. The other supplies are a SpongeBob pencil holder, a Boatmobile phone/Airpods holder, and a Krusty Krab eraser holder. This print comes in two parts, the body and the lid, and is an awesome way to add some personality to your desk! I made this set of office supplies with Rishit, and you can find his profile here.
Design Prompt
Recent analysis by the Staples finance department has concluded that sales for desktop organization products have declined in recent years. The company would like to ramp up their profits in this area by enhancing the aesthetic nature of these products.
Your group of two has been hired to design a set of theme-based organizational products. Your team will design a set of office supplies that are tied together with a common theme. You must be able to justify the theme that connects the products together. The idea is that the customer will not want to buy just one; they will want to buy the whole set.
Assembly Instructions
Before assembling, ensure that you have all the necessary pieces.
1x Pineapple Body (Cladekar_Pineapple_Body)
1x Pineapple Lid (Cladekar_Pineapple_Lid)
Black Permanent Marker
Blue Permanent Marker
This is how your parts should come out of the printer.
Assembly/Coloring
Remove all support material. While it should come off relatively easily on the pineapple, the lid has a significant amount of supports. In order to remove them cleanly, I recommend using pliers to get in between the support and the part then peeling it off.
Use your black marker to color in the frames of the windows. Be careful that the marker ink does not bleed out onto the rest of the pineapple, as it can taint the rest of the pineapple’s hue. In order to avoid this, do not color all the way down the window frames, and blow the ink dry as you apply it.
Use your black marker to color in the door. Take the same precautions as in the last step to avoid the ink bleeding.
Use your blue marker to color in the window panes.
Use your black marker to color in the air vent.
Place the Pineapple Lid onto the Pineapple Body
Congratulations! You now have a pineapple to hold your office supplies!
Design Choices
Mapping the Body Texture
The plan for the texture on the pineapple was initially to create a square sketch with the “X” and linear pattern/circular pattern it around the pineapple. This was the vision for the texture:
However, after doing it, we realized that the edges of the box intersected each other and did not match the curvature of the fruit, as a square will overlap when placed in a circular pattern.
To fix this, we had the idea to wrap the sketch with the texture around a cylinder, then pattern it around the cylinder and continue from there. Unfortunately, the wrap function stretched out the sketch, and circular patterning the wrap did not work.
Note the distortion that occurs when wrapping the texture around the cylinder – The upper extrusion is unwrapped, and the lower one is wrapped. This distortion would ruin the appearance of the pineapple.
Trying to circular pattern the wrap produced an error, rendering the concept useless.
Eventually, I realized that only the horizontal lines of the box were being distorted by the wrap, and I came to the conclusion that taking an approach similar to the original would work if the elements of the sketch were split up into the vertical and horizontal components.
Boss Extruded vertical and horizontal rectangular prisms
When making the cut, the vertical bars now fit the curvature of the body!
This process was repeated with the X texture.
Depth of Body Texture
Originally, the body texture extended 0.3 cm.
We realized that this was too prominent of a texture considering that these lines are supposed to be small accents of the body, not a whole other body. To update this, we decreased the distance the body texture extended to 0.15cm. We believe the new subtlety of the texture is more visually pleasing and draws less attention.
Flexing the Body
Originally, to match the reference design, we planned to flex the body texture 90 degrees. However, this produced a different result than intended, as we realized that the ends of the body must line up vertically when using the flex feature.
This was the vision.
This was the result.
Note how the reference image’s contours are straight lines rotated 45 degrees, and the result’s contours are awkwardly twisted.
We were unhappy with how the flex looked, so we decided to remove it and proceed as the texture originally was. While this new version is less accurate to the version from the show, there are numerous interpretations of this object online, and the texture is still effective even without being rotated. Furthermore, it still adds to the part’s identity and recognizability.
Adding Cosmetic Details
According to the original plan, the design consisted just of the body and the lid without any other cosmetic details. It would have looked like this:
We realized that at this point, the model looked incomplete and too closely resembled a strange sort of pineapple-ish grenade; additionally, it was not immediately recognizable as the pineapple from SpongeBob. We looked back at reference images to determine what we could add or change to make the model more recognizable, and we decided that adding portholes and the door would give the model a stronger identity.
After making the additions, it became clear just how important the cosmetic details were; they completely transformed the model into something immediately recognizable. Added fillets also made the model seem more complete and polished.
Coloring
There are tons of ways we could have colored this model, using up to five colors (Blue, Gray, Green, Yellow, Brown).
It would look something like this:
However, the pineapple is only a few centimeters tall, and printing each color separately would add unnecessary complexity and parts. We realized that the ease of printing should be prioritized over the sheer number of parts; additionally, making the choice to lower the number of colors saved hours of modeling. So, we decided to lower the number of colors to 2: yellow and green, and the rest of the colors could be colored in after the print. This lowers the amount of time and effort it takes to assemble the part and make it desk-ready!
I hope you enjoy this model! If you would like to print the other models (Boatmobile phone holder, SpongeBob pencil holder, Krusty Krab eraser holder), I attached a spreadsheet with all the file names and the colors they should be printed in. Furthermore, if you would like to follow along in SolidWorks or see the complete process of creating this model, I uploaded a PDF step-by-step guide!