Portable Locker from Subnautica: A Hinged Box

Summary:
A faithful recreation of the Portable Locker from the game Subnautica, functioning as a box with a hinge and a latch! This was made in collaboration with @Galaxywar_4675985; the same design can be found on his page!

Assembly Instructions:

[Make sure you have a reference box or an idea of a box you want to create in mind! These instructions demonstrate how we made our box.]

Our reference:

Creating Constraints:

• Create a constraint cube. In our case, we made a 20cm x 20cm x 20cm constraint cube.

Getting the Box Right:

• Start creating the body of the box, without the lid. The lid will become a separate object! (If you do start modeling everything as a singular body, you can split it later with the Split feature! We ended up doing this with our box.)

• This segment is freeform! Create the best replica of the reference box you can, or simply make an intricate box that you like! Just make sure not to make the shape of the box TOO complex. You will be affixing hinges to this, after all.

• Separate your bodies if needed! Printing everything as one body is sometimes not the best idea. In our design, we split the handles from the main box, with the intent of putting the box and the handles together after they were printed. 

Creating the Hinge:

• Choose a hinge design! Each hinge comes with its own unique advantages and disadvantages. Living hinges, for example, are very flexible, but are rather simplistic, and can break easily. They also require some sort of latch if you need the box to remain closed. For our box, we chose a mechanical print-in-place hinge.

• There are plenty of good step-by-step tutorials online on how to create hinges. Follow them properly, and you’ll end up with a functional hinge! (If you are curious, we used this video.)

Optional Touches:

• We added a latch to our box! Albeit it was rather rushed… if you DO want to add a latch, make sure the dimensions line up, and that when the box closes the two bumps are fully flush!

• There is a decorative button on the lid of our box. If you have the mechanical engineering skills, you could make this box button-activated! We didn’t have time to, unfortunately…

Printing:

• Export the .3MF files and open it in any 3D-modeling software (We used OrcaSlicer.)

• Color your box however you want!

• Print, and you’re done!