hey there youtube. is your morning coffee tasting a little... sharp? are you having trouble taking the edge off? if so,
ultimate guide to 3d printing, why not try starting your day with a little bit of a twist? with the all new squircle mug. because, who says your mornings should be bound
by the limitations of physical reality? here at make anything we think that's bullsh- ♫intro music!♫ ♫cool!♫ hey everybody! it's devin here again with make anything and, if the intro didn't give it away, today we're taking a more in-depth look at this
ambitious cylinder illusion i posted a really quick video at two in the morning last week explaining how this illusion worked. and it blew up. so today i'm going to explain a few of the variations and how those work, and i'm also gonna show you how i actually made the shape in solid works. so here's the ambiguous cylinder in it's simplest form but i played around with the file and made a few variations. here's a square peg fitting into a round hole with no gaps!
and here's another one where the reflection apparently doesn't mirror the image! from one angle these shapes look identical, but the one on the left has an extra hidden ring in the middle! these rings all interconnect, but the squares are just side by side. and here's another one that's just a little more complex. it's a super convincing illusion! and all this variety comes from one simple shape and i like to call that shape the squircle. ♫transition shwoop♫ so the shape is actually made in adobe illustrator first. and the reason i use illustrator is it because it has this blend tool
which generates the transitional shapes between two paths. sometimes it's a little finicky so on this one i had to rotate the square to get it to work but in the end it did it's job and i've got a really nice looking squircle right there so i'm going to expand those paths, ungroup it, and then select just the squircle and then i'm gonna export that as a .dxf so i can open it in solid works in solid works i open up a new part and then i select the top plane and insert a .dxf drawing. so i select that file i made and i bring it in with the .dxf command box. so now i've got that very important shape in solid works!
first i give the shape some dimension and i just chose 30mm because i think it's a good size for a kind of little trinket illusion like this. then i use the sketch offset tool to create a 2mm thick wall which i can extrude! and i just extrude that 40mm for now although i can really make it as tall or as short as want it. i'm gonna open this sketch on the right plane so i can make that wavy cut out which makes this illusion work. i create a center line from the origin so that i can split this in half and then i made a spline with 3 points so that i could easily create this wavy shape.
i box that off, and then i use the extrude cut feature to cut away that shape. now i can preview the effect within solid works, and i can actually turn on perspective too to get an idea of what it'll look like in real life. so just eyeballing the wave i already got it to be a pretty effective illusion but i did go back into the sketch to play around with that curve to see if i could make the illusion work even better. and i actually ended up deleting that spline and replacing it with arcs and that makes it really easy for me to adjust the curves. so once i figured out a 15 mm radius worked the best
i set that dimension and committed to the cut! however you might notice that the illusion is still a little bit off, the top edge of the cylinder seems to fluctuate in thickness but we want it to look consistent all the way around. at first i tried to do a cut sweep around the top edge, just to make everything flat but solid works was going kind of crazy. so i ended up using a loft cut by drawing several squares along the top edge of this shape. i loft between the profiles, using the edges of the cylinder as a guide for the cut. these loft cuts keep the top edge flat so the illusion is more convincing.
i continue doing loft cuts, one quarter at a time, until i've created a flat surface all the way around the top edge of my model. well, actually, i realised i didn't have to loft cut every side, because my model is symmetrical so i could just mirror the cuts. once i've done that, the top edge is complete. but i still wanna create the same wavy edge along the bottom of the shape and it's actually really simple to do here! all i have to do is use the move-copy-bodice tool and i drag that bodice straight down and create a copy
so that i can subtract it from the original shape and i can do that with the combine tool, as you see here. so now we pretty much have a working ambiguous cylinder but i'm gonna do a little extra step by creating my own supports so that i can print this on my 3d printer without using generated support material. this helps create a little bit of a cleaner edge on the bottom of the shape. so i create my support by drawing on the top plane which represents the build plate of my printer i use convert entities to match the shape of my cylinder
and then i offset those lines by 0.6mm, because that's how thick i want the support walls to be. now i just want to extrude these walls up to my model but offset by 0.3mm, so that the support material doesn't fuse with the model. sometimes it works very smoothly but other times you have to play around a little bit in solid works. in this case i had to use the surface tools to create an offset from the bottom of my model. i also used the rule-surface tool to expand the thickness of my surface even having done this, the up-to surface command wasn't working so i ended up just extruding without merging with my model and then using that offset surface as a split tool
so that i could delete the parts of the support material that intersect with my model. what i'm left with is a nice, simple support structure. with some of the more complex experiments it would've been too much works to make supports this way. so i did use computer generated supports for some of the models. *furiously 3d printing* i'm not gonna go through the making of the other versions of this illusion because they all basically use the same principle. there is one version of the illusion that [kokichi] sugihara made where two boxes are crossing over each other but in the reflection you see two cylinders that aren't touching. and while i have some idea of how this works i could not completely figure it out.
so that one remains a mystery for me right now, but if you think you know how he does it, please share! i also wanna show you this little trick i came up with to test the illusion in solid works i created an assembly with this fake mirror and then by using the mirror components tool i could simulate what the reflection would look like. it's pretty cool! i could move the components around and the reflection follows. alright that's it for this episode and i just wanna welcome all the new subscribers who have joined in the last week i am super excited that this little make anything community is growing
i love hearing from you guys whether it's comments, suggestions or even criticisms
i read every comment so thanks everyone for watching and i hope to see you next time! *boop*
