Dolls House Furniture Part 1 – Tutorial

By

In part 1 of this 2-part SOLIDWORKS tutorial we created a furniture set for a dolls house lounge, this includes a fireplace, coffee table, sofa and plant. The tutorial uses a range of 3d tools, and sketch tools to design them. The furniture is 1:12 scale or the 1-inch scale as it’s also known for dolls houses, so if you’re modelling dolls house furniture based on your own furniture, remember to scale it down based on this. The cottage dolls house created in another SOLIDWORKS tutorial is perfect for this scale furniture. Visit the SOLIDWORKS blog to see this.

 

The tutorial involves creating the individual furniture parts, each piece of furniture that is created is built up of separate bodies, this is to mimic how the furniture would be created in real life circumstances. In the toy industry most pieces of furniture are made with 6mm thick wooden sheets and are reinforced by other wood thicknesses and are constructed using glue and slotted features. Painted parts are usually reinforced MDF, whereas unpainted wood is plywood or rubber wood for a nicer finish.

To create the furniture, a range of tools were used to speed up the modeling including dynamic mirror features, linear patterns and mirror bodies. Linear pattern is used to create the slatted pattern seen on the coffee table and sofa, and mirror bodies is used on the coffee table legs and sofa arms to quickly copy over the design.

As seen in the below rendering done in SOLIDWORKS visualize, there is also some furniture for the Dolls house rooms upstairs which are available to download Dolls House Furniture Extras. If you would like to download and see how they were created, there are also some extra accessories in there too, but they aren’t necessary for the tutorial.

As the furniture pieces are modeled in the tutorial, decals and/or appearances are added before saving and closing the part, but this is not part of the tutorial. You may choose to add your own decals or appearances, or you can download the decals used Dolls House Furniture Decals if you wish.

Jade Wilson

I am a 3D Designer and SOLIDWORKS Blog Contributor from the UK. I am a self taught SOLIDWORKS user, and have been using it to inform and create my designs since 2012. I specialize in the design of Ceramics, Home Accessories and Wooden Toy Design.