This project is a collaboration between my partner Nicole and I. We were brainstorming on possible projects when Nicole suggested a ring holder. This subject supported our goal of collaborating on something that is both beautiful and functional.

After some introductory sketching helped us rough out the design concept, I imported an image of an oyster shell into Rhino for tracing. I used the bezier tool to construct a closed curve based on the image of the oyster.

Supplies

3D Printer, filament

Step 1: Extrude Curve to Point

With the curve, I used ExtrudeCrvToPoint to turn the curve into a polysurface roughly shaped like a pointy shell.

Step 2: Extrude Surface

I then used ExtrudeSrf to transform the surface into solid geometry suitable for printing.

Step 3: Transform

At this point, I scaled the shell shape up to match my desired dimensions.

Step 4: Conical Primitives

I used the cone primitive in Rhino to construct the base and the ring holder itself.

Step 5: Extrude Curve (again)

For the bed of the shell, I used the original traced curve and executed a simple extrude command to transform the curve into a thin platform that rests on the main shell mesh.

Step 6: Test Print Story

After going through the design flow once, I decided to do a test print of the cropped ring holder to test it with a real ring.

I'm glad that this was possible. This test print revealed that our ring holder shaft was far too large. Going back, I resized the ring holder shaft and added a small divot to make it easy to store a pearl up there.