I want to design something spherical and has some carved patterns on it. So light can come through easily with some shading effects.

My thought is to design a spherical surface, design some patterns, and do surface morph.

Step 1: Design and Test the Lamp Holder for Fitting

I checked my lamp and it has a lock that rotates and locks the lamp shade fitting connections. So I designed something similar that could fit the fitting (white object printed).

Step 2: Pattern Design - Circle Packing

To realize the idea of patterning on a surface, I found a useful tool called 'imgcircles' in Kangroo. Here is a link to some related examples: https://www.grasshopper3d.com/photo/circle-packing...

The imgcircles tool packs images with different sized circles according to the image's color gradient mesh. I used a simple black and white image as input, and generated a packed circle of smaller circles. To make it to be used as patterns, I did some other operations we learned in the class to make the pattern a polysurface.

Step 3: Spherical Polysurface Mesh and Morph Surface

I have a problem with the parametric method:

The parametric method generates the polysurface mesh. But it takes very long time for me to wrap the pattern on the surface. There are also a lot of faces that I need to select. I tried converting mesh to surface, but it still takes forever. I think maybe because the generated parametric surface is too complicated for morphsurface.

So I moved on with a simple sphere component and it worked!

Step 4: Boolean Objects Together

I boolean the holder and the lampshade together first, then use the 'split' tool to split the extra parts using the overlapping surfaces.

In the first model I generated, many circles are tangent to each other and that causes some disconnection problems. So I modified the circles shape to make spacings between them and finally the model is showing good in Cura. Can't wait to see how our printer handles this geometry.

Step 5: 3D Printing

After some failures, finally the printer worked fine and started to print normally. The resulting print has some issues at the bottom and at the top layers. There are also issues in the overhang area on sides. I expected that because I did not want to use support materials. But overall, it looks great! I trimmed the overhanging materials on one side and left the other side as it looks pretty good.