Desk lamp

Dave R

Nice lamp Bob.

An alternative way to approach the spring is to draw a small segment of the coil or even a single turn of the coil and make it a component. Then copy the component as many time as needed for the length. hide the edges at the ends to hide the joint between components. The hooks at the ends could also be instances of the one component. This would reduce the file size a great deal.

As an example of this, take a look at the end of this blog entry. I used this method to create threads for a pipe clamp but it would work for the spring as well.

watkins

Thanks Urgen!

Thanks James!

Praise from the both of you is praise indeed.

Dear David,

Yes, I did think about reducing the polycount, but my original intention was to while away a few hours modelling something close to hand (using a plastic ruler I eyeballed dimensions to get the proportions right). In that respect, low poly modelling was not my aim. I was also curious to see how well I could model the plastic components, which were far from simple shapes. The intersections went well and I was able to cleanup all redundant geometry, so I was pleased enough with the result to post here even though lamps are two a penny (or should that be two a dime). I thought about redrawing the spring component, but I had already spent too much time modelling so....

When modelling something (like a household object), does the question, "Why!", ever enter your head, and do you just ignore it and carry on? Should I seek help?

Kind regards,
Bob

Ross Macintosh

Thanks Bob! I saved the one w/o springs and know it will come in very handy.

Regards, Ross

Dave R

"When modelling something (like a household object), does the question, "Why!", ever enter your head, and do you just ignore it and carry on? Should I seek help?"

Yes, it does and yes, I do. I doubt there's much help that anyone could give.

Keep doing it, Bob.

Best,

Dave

dylan

Thanks Bob for this great looking lamp.

Gaieus

Hi All,

If you don't need a very realistically looking spring for your lamp (i.e. to save geometry and for farther shots), you can use a semi transparent png texture positioned slightly rotated on the surface.
Note that it runs around more than once so it is really not accurate for a spring but who cares from a distance? (I made it 1 cm wide and 10 cms long but you can adjust it to your needs).

And the skippy:

Spiral.skp

watkins

Dear Dylan,

Thank you for your kind comments. The lamp was really my way of improving my modelling skills. I am slowly working out how best to align parts, but I still found the springs tricky to position.

Dear Gaieus,

Many thanks for the semi-transparent texture. Would this be an application for the UV tool, say mapping concentric rings onto the walls of a cylinder? If so, then we might also have a new way of representing threaded parts.

Regards,
Bob

Dave R

Gai,

That works very nicely for for a spring. Thanks for posting it.

Bob, I've used the Sketchy_Lines_Wavy materials to represent threads and it seems to be at least understandable. No UV mapping required for that. You just have to scale the texture down.

Gaieus

@watkins said:

...Would this be an application for the UV tool, say mapping concentric rings onto the walls of a cylinder? If so, then we might also have a new way of representing threaded parts.

Regards,
Bob

I did not use the UV tools in this case (although it could be involved) because when I tried, it set it back to horizontal (maybe it could be used however but I just wanted to present a quick idea) if you mean that (if not, I1m not sure what you ment above - please, remember that English is not my mother tongue )