Octopus in SolidWorks

This post I decided to create something that was a little out of the ordinary.  This octopus took me a quite a while to complete.  I started by creating sketches for the head of the octopus in order to define the shape.  I then used lofts and boundary surfaces to make the entire head.  For each tentacle I created an individual 3D sketch that would turn into the shape of its tentacles.  On that 3D sketch, multiple cross sections were created that would be used to give the tentacles their shape.  A loft was used to connect all the profiles together using the 3D sketch as a centerline.  This was done for all the remaining tentacles.  The head was connected to the tentacles using boundary surfaces.  At that time I made the octopus into a solid object.  The suction cups on the tentacles were created as separate bodies and were copied and positioned using the move/copy feature found under insert.  These were then combined to form the single body of the octopus.  I added a number of fillets in order to give the octopus a more natural shape.  For the coloring I created a customized design and then brought it into SolidWorks to use as an appearance.  I hope you enjoy what I have created.

 Ian Jutras

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Mechanical Engineering 2013