For the Love of Succulents! Tinkercad Designer 3D Prints Middle Eastern Villa Planters

Most of us enjoy and admire art whether we are actually engaged in the process ourselves or not. And while so often all the rest of us get to do is take a look and enjoy beauty and originality without hearing from the artist, yet another unique and wonderful facet of 3D printing is the element of sharing. Not only do we get to hear from the creator, but within the making community, often you are encouraged to try your hand at making their design as well. It’s not so much about the ownership as it is the joy, with designers allowing you to reap the rewards of their hard work—as well as encouraging you to offer up any improvements for open-source models.

Yuriy Sklyar’s enthusiasm for the results of his latest work is undeniably infectious. While getting to the desired end took some effort, as he says, he loves plants, and he loves planters. If you feel the same way, then the 3D printed Middle Eastern Villas are a design you’ll definitely want to check out. Using the image seen below, he was inspired to create these prints which aren’t just detailed architectural models, but more importantly, serve to hold beautiful flowers and succulent plants to brighten and freshen up the home, as well as the air.

From Autodesk, Yuriy is a designer, creator, and entrepreneur who also founded the threefifty design studio with his brother Eugene. No strangers to creating intricate 3D printed architectural models, we’ve also enjoyed designs like the modular and magnetic construction sets they’ve created. Yuriy is currently working in Growth at Autodesk, furthering the Tinkercad app, which he states “aims to redefine how future generations think, giving them a creator’s/designer’s view of the world.”

Here, Yuriy again uses Tinkercad and the MakerBot Replicator for a project that was actually meant to showcase the popular design and modeling software at 2016 Maker Faire Bay Area in May. As a venue for makers to show off and share their latest designs, the show was the perfect place to highlight what Tinkercad—and Yuriy—can do.

The original design, according to Yuriy, took only 30 minutes to create. After that, he kept working with his creation, sticking with it even when the going apparently got a bit frustrating—and it’s refreshing to hear experienced designers say that yes, they too often find some things difficult, tedious, and on the unpleasant side as they are working toward an end.

“I chose MakerBot Z18 to print this model in large scale, so it could fit larger succulents—check out the huge Eve’s Needle Cactus!” said Yuriy. “I absolutely hated the whole process, but in the end I was able to get to a more or less satisfactory result.”

Not only do users have the benefit of downloading and printing a design that allows you to skip all those extra steps in creating and re-working and refining, but once fabricated you can pick any assortment of plants to go in the Middle Eastern Villas—from aloe vera plants or herbs to vibrant flowers lining the mini flower boxes.

The Z18 is meant for professional projects, requiring high performance, that are on the larger side. In combination with Tinkercad, designers of all experience levels can enjoy user-friendly software that relies on shapes as its ‘building blocks’ for 3D models. The shapes are used to add and remove material, and you can also create your own within the program, or import them. Grouping allows for more complex models, and you also have the choice to create vector shapes and then import them. There are numerous tutorials to help get you started—and after that, more than four million designs to check out in the 3D Design Gallery.

“Tinkercad gets you thinking in more creative, and, more importantly, simpler ways, which ultimately generates a better design in the end,” states Yuriy when discussing the software as it related to this last project.

The files for the Middle Eastern Villas are available at both Tinkercad and Thingiverse. Would you like to see more of Yuriy’s designs? If so, check them out here at Tinkercad. Discuss this project over in the 3D Printed Middle Eastern Planters forum at 3DPB.com.