Distorted Vase

The distorted vase is a 3d printable vase that I designed in OpenSCAD. It’s a small script that I nevertheless want to share with you not because of the vase, there are plenty of nice designs out there, but because the script contains some little tricks.

Undoubtedly the vase could have been scripted in many other ways and probably more efficiently too but this example demonstrates nicely to combine polygon, hull and intersection in OpenSCAD to create some neat shapes.

How does it work? First we create a number of polygons. The polygon is two dimensional shape in the xy-plane. Next each polygon is transformed into a 3d-shape, the segment in the script, and placed around the origin with the height in the z-direction. The segments are evenly spaced thus creating a star like shape.

Now the star-like shape is sliced in the z-direction and the hull operation is used to wrap each slice. All slices on top of each other result in the desired 3d-shape.

The coordinates of all the polygons are contained by the matrix list variable. To create a distorted vase I use the sine function to vary some of the coordinates. The variation is based on number of the segment. The sine function can get a value between -1 and 1 but I limit the values between 0 and 1 to give the vase a more funnel like appearance. Of course we need to multiply the sine function to achieve a visible effect.

The possibilities are endless we could for instance make the height of the vase variable by adding another sine function but I leave that to the viewer.

This is licensed as CC BY-SA (explanation of Creative Common licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/)

OpenSCAD is software for creating solid 3D CAD objects. It is free software (GPLv2) and available for Linux/UNIX, MS Windows and Mac OS X.