Introduction: Creating a Bishop Chess Piece Using SelfCAD
In this instructable, we’re going to learn two ways to make a bishop chess piece, one way if you have a picture of something that you want to make somewhat exactly and one way that you can make it completely your own! Both ways use only one tool!
Step 1: Introduction
To make a replica we’re going to need to learn a really cool feature where you can add an image to your workspace. You can use this as a reference, trace, or even just for decoration but I imagine that would get distracting.
Go to view, reference image, and add an image from your computer or download one from online. By default, it will be added to the center of your workspace, along with most things you drop into SelfCAD as shown in the second image.
Step 2: Tracing Around the Image
Now click on Drawing, freehand drawing and click spline. Before we start drawing make sure you go to height settings and make sure the height is set to 0!
We’re going to be drawing a profile, not a surface and not a 3D object. Should I back up for a minute?
A profile is an outline made up of splines without any mesh. A surface is a filled-in profile without any thickness, even if the surface is a twist so it’s not 2D if there’s no thickness it’s still not an object. A 3D object is an object that has thickness and depth to it. Ok so back to drawing, there are a bunch of cool features on here let’s say if we wanted to make a flat object but symmetrical, we could check off symmetry and only draw half and the other half will be drawn for us. Because we want our bishop to be round, even though it’s symmetrical we’re not going to use that tab. But we are only going to draw half the object, you can start by freehand drawing half the bishop. Don’t be scared of freehand drawing, there is a button smoothness that you can set which will make your lines less shaky and if you go slow the spline will automatically be attracted to the lines in your reference image so SelfCAD is actually doing half the work for you!
Now with our spline selected go-to tools, revolve. The computer will already try figuring out what we want and revolve the wrong way but just ignore that for a moment, we will fix it. Check out the third image how this is achieved.
Step 3: Finalizing the Model
On the revolve tab select revolve around the edge. Because we don’t have an edge selected that we want to revolve around, click draw and close up the open spline we drew before, right now it’s also helpful that our reference image is in the center so we can close up our spline along our grid.
Now once you click confirm you will have your bishop piece!
There is just one more step we need to do. We need to make sure our bishop stands flat on our chessboard. With our bishop object selected, go to deform and flatten.(See the second image to learn more).
Now rotate your bishop so it’s standing up and start modeling the rest of your pieces! As shown in the third image.
