Bubblescape

A cluster of soap bubbles, lit from behind. That was the whole picture in my head. Every piece before this had come out of SolidWorks, but SolidWorks does not want to make bubbles, so this one pulled Blender into the workflow for the first time. I took spheres of different sizes and fused them together until the surface read as a cluster.

The organic surface made the inside harder. The print uses three materials, black for the mask, white to bounce light, and clear for diffusion, over a 16 x 16 matrix. Keeping the internal grid even under a lumpy exterior was a step up in complexity. The pixels cannot get close enough to the face to hotspot, and the model cannot have a single overhang. An overhang makes a pocket the matrix underneath can never reach, and it shows up as a dead dark spot in the middle of a glowing bubble.