Candle Lantern Tutorial

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Welcome to this tutorial for a Candle Lantern,  you will need to download the files for Candle Lantern Tutorial here to follow the tutorial. You will begin with a plain lantern model, sketching onto the glass pane, the linear pattern is used to create a guide sketch of a honeycomb design. Individual elements are then selected and converted back into workable entities. Some hexagons are left as construction sketches, gaps are needed to fit bees into the gaps further on.

The sketch is then used for a thin feature, the preview allows you to see how the honeycomb design will look,. When creating the design you have to ensure that the thin feature overlaps, otherwise the design wont hold together.

 

The converted hexagons are all selected, and keeping the feature un-merged from the lantern the individual thin feature parts are combined to each other using combine and add to create this honeycomb design. The DXF file is used as a guide for creating the bee, it involves basic extrusions, filleting the faces and combining the bodies into one. The bee is the copied and moved into the honeycomb spaces. The thin feature is used again to create bee trails which are used later on to join the bees to the window design.

Once the design is done, the honeycomb is filleted, the bees are combines to the design and it is shelled from the back face to create a metal press formed appearance, which is how the lantern would be made. The design can then simply be mirrored over, on the front to back. The process is repeated on the sides, and then mirrored over. once the design is finished the bodies are merged to the lantern body separate to the glass panes.

At the end of the design I created a basic corner room for the lantern to sit in for the rendering, this would show off how the lanterns shadows cast the design. The finished part is exported into SOLIDWOKRS Visualize. Here I could edit appearances further, add a light to the candle, and play around with its color, warmth, and brightness.

Visualize allowed me to create realistic renderings of the lantern light up and casting shadows on the wall. With more time spent tweaking the model it could look even better! The design possibilities are endless!

 

Jade Wilson

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.