Options for modelling this bowl?

Hello!

I need some help with figuring out how to model a piece if anyone is up for the challenge :slight_smile:

My idea is for a bowl. I want to laser cut some layers that are shaped like flower petals which will form the the bowl itself. The laser cut pieces will stack one on top of the other and each successive piece will be scaled and rotated to create a cool pattern (see my image with 3 layers so far from the bottom looking up - there will be many many more added hopefully).

The base of the bowl will be 3D printed. I started with a really plain cylinder shape.

Next I wanted to have small arms coming out of the cylinder that will provide ‘steps’ for each laser cut piece to sit on. And because the arms will sit between the petals it will prevent the pieces from rotating.

But the problem is I want the outer part of the arm to have an organic form and not look like straight up and down steps. I’m struggling to figure out how to model this. I tried a few different ways:


But it just looks crappy. I know this is a bit of a weird idea, so I’m not really after feedback about the design itself but I would love some direction on how to go about modelling this so that it looks nice :slight_smile: Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

There’s a lot going on here in terms of the intersections you’ll get between the arms and the bowl slices but this method might be useful for you. Use Pipe with History Recorded and then edit the curve for the pipe surface. BooleanUnion and BlendEdge the intersection with the main cylinder. The intersections with the bowl slices can be done the way I’m showing with a BooleanDifference but I know this doesn’t match your exact design. For the pipes/arms to morph into the sections of the bowl slices, I think you’ll need to manually model those transitions. This will be tedious as the solutions change with each intersection. Trim back areas of the arm and slices and then make four sided surfaces to make these connections if you want to model it more as you’ve shown. NetworkSrf provides continuity options when the input is surface edges.


If you post a portion of the model with the slices and the intersecting arm I bet you’ll get some other feedback.