Creating a mold shell for 3d printing

Technical Support Modeling
1

Hi Blender community,

I need to find an easier way to create shell to be used for silocone mold making.

I have a sculpt that is somewhat complex and will be printed in multiple scaled sizes. The mold needs to be 0.25" thick and the shell should be low detail, 0.125" thickness with a separate left and right side.

I have been using a cylinder, getting to the general size and shape, shrinkwrapping and setting the offset to .25, adjusting size, removing the top and bottom faces, subdividing to smooth, using boolean to get the top and bottom flat, solidifying at .125, using boolean to cut the shell in half.

A friend does this using inflate, but it has a lot of geometry and takes exponentially longer to print.

My problem comes with scaling, when I scale up it increases the size of the void in between the sculpt and the mold shell, which makes the cost of the mold go up as well as difficulty pulling the print from the mold.

Is there an easier workflow?

Or a way to scale up while keeping the void at .25 in?

It doesn’t have to be pretty, just simple to print and consistency in the size of the void.

Thanks friends

2

Have you tried this? https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/moldforge/ might be able to use it for what you are doing. Scale it and make your mold around it. Hope it works out for you :slightly_smiling_face:

3

I will definitely try this! Thank you

4

I couldn’t quite get the extension to work the way I needed, but came across this and it works perfectly

https://moldboxer.com/

Thank you

5

Glad it worked out for you, and you found a good mold maker. Happy casting, hope to see some of your creations :grinning_face: