Dolls House Furniture Part 2 – Tutorial

In part 2 of this 2-part SOLIDWORKS tutorial we created a furniture set for a dolls house kitchen, this includes a kitchen unit with functional doors, a dining table and chairs. 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.

You will need to have completed part 1 of the tutorial if you want to have the lounge furniture set. As mentioned in part 1 of the tutorial, there is also some furniture for the Dolls house rooms upstairs which are available to download here 

This 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. Wooden hinges were added in this tutorial for the kitchen unit’s oven and cupboard doors. A metal or wooden rod was added to the door through the doors side and it sits into the counter top and base so that the door could pivot on it. Using move/copy bodies the oven and cupboard door are opened using the temporary axis of the hinge rods. The move/copy bodies can then be suppressed in the part, when the furniture is placed into an assembly, it can then be un-suppressed to open and close the doors, this is useful to create different views for renderings.

At the end of the tutorial, I add all the furniture pieces to an assembly, including the extra accessories, they can all be seen in the below rendering.