Faberge Egg

thingiverse

I wanted to create a one-of-a-kind Easter egg for my wife, so I fired up Blender and started experimenting with ways of wrapping a texture onto a perfectly spherical shape.\r\nI discovered that mapping a basic diamond grid onto a UV sphere would produce a lovely spiral pattern, so I added some tiny flower shapes and a photo frame outline then applied the texture as a displacement map.\r\n\r\nThe "top" and "bottom" STLs have an inner wall and can be printed without any rafts or supports. Just make sure you have good adhesion on that first layer or you'll end up with a mess of tangled layers like I did with my initial attempt!\r\n\r\nIf you want to design your own egg, load up the Blender file and replace the texture file with any image you prefer. Ideally it should be square and tile-able, but you can use a photo if you don't mind having a seam down the back of your egg.\r\n\r\nOnce you save out the STL you'll have a solid egg, I hollowed mine out by importing it into 3D Builder and then subtracting the "Egg_inside" object from it. This is preferable to using a Solidify or similar operation because you don't need all the surface detail to be replicated on the inner surface.\r\n\r\nThe stand is just a simple ring shape with legs made from this "Ornamental Flourish" object: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:934503