Pen holder arrived

The holder finally arrived, and it fits pens, pencils and scissors. Overall, the edges were smooth but some parts where like sharper than expected so could be smoother like a sphere. Fits up to 15 pens with ease, any more may cause a jam. I'm happy it turned out fairly nice!

Submission

For my submission, I want to include two iterations of the head in order to see which head looks better as one head isn't as prone to an error and is slightly more appealing to the eye. However, the other one is just as necessary as its more accurate and has more potential for me to identify future updates to the holder.

Created the head

After hours of work and revisions and fillets, I finally created a head that somewhat resembles Happy. I started with a sphere and slowly made extrudes and shapes that resembles his features. The hard thing is smoothing out the surface in order to get that 3D no sharp surfaces although fillet has issues with fully spherical shapes when it originally isn't one. But, beyond that the holder is complete. However, when testing in the printing-legion file, there was a huge error. The print wasn't manifolded. This meant that the head has gaps that could lead to issues when printing. As such, I am working on figuring out where could the issue reside. I have made several iterations, but the print seems to have a hole I must search for.

Update:
Upon several attempts in slack, a helpful member Ethan in slack checked my CAD for me and has confirmed that the print is able to be placed into a print meaning it works. Which is good news for me, and I have confirmed that all the extrudes have been converted to joins not new body to make sure no overlap exists.

Piecing out the pen holder - the Base

To start off the pen holder, I originally thought to just make the head and then that would suffice as a stand. However, looking closely at the reference, Happy has a little bag/ribbon around his neck. I thought it would be nice to have it attached to the pen holder. However, instead of attaching it to the pen holder itself, which if I did could lead to irregular shapes and not as good aesthetically. I decided to divide the head and the ribbon into two pieces. The head would still be the pen holder, however, the ribbon would be a little stand for the head to rest on as if he is still wearing the ribbon. This creates two pieces and more useability for both items as the head can still rest on its own but the ribbon base could be used as a coaster for desks where people don't like directly putting the drink on their desk. So to have some ease of cading, I created the base(ribbon) first.

Making the ribbon was a bunch of trial and error where I had to draw an approximation in cad then implement my best judgement to revise it. After making the outline of the drawing, I tried just extruding it but without some space inbetween each piece of the ribbon, it just has only an outside shape. As such, I offset the outline to create space. Then, I extruded the outline by 0.02 and the inside by 0.05 to create that 3D effect. However, as it is sort of cubic, the shape wasn't as nice looking as I wanted. So I then add fillets to the outline edge to create some circular shaping to the inside to look more like a ribbon from up top than just a cubic drawing.

- Before

- After, with more rounded edges

Design choice

Starting this project, I worked on figuring out what I needed and the first thing that came to mind was a pen holder. I have multiple pens that just lay on my table that could easily be styled into a 3D printed pen holder so then came the design choice.

There's the basic pen holder that's just an extrude then shell it out. But, I found that to be too basic and generic so I wanted to put my own kick into it. Similar to my previous project, I was planning from three choices. Kirby, a Potato head style cup with interchangeable parts, and a skull. However, then I recalled that I originally wanted to make Happy from fairy tail for my phone stand that I couldn't do so I decided to make it for this.