Looking to transform makies Jack'O'Lantern into a Turkey-Day Pumpkin...

[jdg56]

Hi all,

As a total n00b in 3d modelling (but a technologist in general for many years), I'm looking for some help in what is certainly a trivial operation, if only I knew were to look for documentation...

The basic project is this:

There is a Thing ( http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:172135 ), which is an excellent jack-o-lantern, sized to hold an LED tea light. I've made about a dozen of them for halloween decorations (home, office, friends). I've been thinking that this pumpkin, without the scary face, would hold a tea light and be an excellent table centerpiece for Thanksgiving.

I've searched all over Thingiverse, but don't see a non-scary-face version of this thing.

So, I started pondering the options, and, on looking at the .stl, it appears that this pumpkin has 12 panels that are pretty much the same size. The face is on 4 of the panels, and the rest of them are just nice pumpkin segments.

My thought is, if I can slice the jack-o-lantern in half on a vertical axis such that it bisects the panels so the face is on one side, I can delete that face, duplicate and invert the other face, match them up together and glue them into a whole pumpkin.

I run linux, so Blender or openscad would be the tools that are easily available to me. I'm looking at the documentation, but, especially for Blender, the documentation is so large that I have to keep in mind that we're only 2.5 weeks away from turkey-day.

Does anyone in this forum know of a blender (or openscad) tutorial that covers this? I've been googling the subject, but am not having much luck with my google-fu so far. I have found some man pages for mirroring topology, but would appreciate a few pointers on how to apply it for my situation.

If this is a trivial task, and anyone wants to point out how obvious it is, I will take that gracefully.

Thanks in advance for any pointers to tutorials (or tutorials) that you can offer.

Cheers,

John

[Roxy]

Try plugging this code into OpenScad. It slices the pumpkin in half and and uses the uncut part to replace the front part that has the face.
I'm not including the .STL file on purpose. You have to do a little bit of work!

get_half_of_pumpkin();
translate([-.5,.1,0]) rotate([0,0,180]) get_half_of_pumpkin();


module get_half_of_pumpkin() {

    intersection() {
        translate([1.5,5.5,0]) rotate([0,0,0]) import("pumpkin_body_battery_tea_light.stl");
        translate([-50,0,-1]) cube([100,100,100]);
    }
}

Uncut_Pumpkin.jpg

[jdg56]

D'uh. I guess that'll do it. Thank you very much. Now I can print out my table centerpieces and try to use the 2.5 weeks to figure out how to do it in Blender.

Cheers,

John

[joealarson]

The other option is you slice the model in half in blender and add a mirror modifier. That's how I'd do it.