Captured Snowflake Ornament

Once again its time to think about Christmas,

Here is my first Christmas design, a Captured Snowflake ornament (7.5cm accross) hopefully capturing the magic of Christmas and displaying it all year round, this was initially intended to be hung on a Christmas tree with some ribbon threaded through the loop but i think this would look good all year round.

The first image shows the design, the second shows you how the snowflake is 'Captured' within the star from 6 points by using chains.

Tell me what you think, feedback would be appreciated.

WOW!

That's beautiful! Did you print it yet? How does it look?

Thanks!

I have ordered a print and got the email today that it is 'en route to the 3d printers' so should be with me hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

Here is the final finished model, the edges of the star were chamfered in different ways to produce this effect.:

Just an update, the prototype has arrived and it looks great!
Photos are on the product page and it is now for sale: http://shpws.me/muEP

Hey, are the chains printed without problems? Their parts are suspended...

Yes, the chains are printed without any problems due to the SLS 3d printing manufacturing technique and are surprisingly strong for their size due to the un-brittle nature of this material and high tensile strength. If you look at the design page: http://shpws.me/muEP there is a video showing the design and the chains.

Cool! I didn't know that with this material you can print "suspended" things!
That's great news for me as I have a lot of ideas that require to print stuff with no base or almost no base.

Ooh, I like this. Very neat idea with the suspended snowflake - I would not have thought to make something that is suspended. I'll have to hold onto that idea, at least for plastic prints.

A couple questions:
1. Have you considered making the chains just a tad looser? It seems to me that the suspension is very subtle at the moment. That's just my 2 cents.
2. If I may ask, what program did you use to make this? In particular, I'm wondering how you made the nice curves (of the cage) that seem to fuse at the middle. I can make curves in Blender, but getting curves to fuse like that takes manual steps towards the end of my process.

Thanks,

The chains are actually loose enough to allow full movement within the constraints of the cage so i don't think it would help by slackening them enlarging the cage or shrinking the snowflake will create a larger range of movement however i do not feel this is neccassary the suspension is a lot more apparent and obvious in person.

To your second question, the software I use is Autodesk Inventor, I created 2 curves following the contours of the cage and then used the sweep command, these were then repeated in a circular pattern, regarding the fusing in the middle, they did not fuse neatly at first as you can see from this image:

I simply cut away straight down at the mess of edges until a flat surface emerged.

LOL Brute force always work at last

Fair enough about the chains.

I used Autodesk in college. It has nice boolean operations that I envy while using Blender. I probably haven't looked hard enough for a program with sufficient boolean operations to deal with the stuff I've been making. I just arrange things the way I want and let Shapeways' software merge overlapping shells. Thankfully, I haven't had any issues with that thus far. Otherwise, I'll need to include shell merging in my workflow somehow.

SW's boolean unions is really nice, I admit