Festive Ceramic Plate Tutorial

For this tutorial I wanted to demonstrate the use of the wrap feature against spline surfaces, so I chose to use the curved face of a plate to add a wrap embossed design. The DXF file for the holly design is available to download Holly DXF file, you will need this to follow the tutorial. The full video is below at the end.

To create the plate profile, I sketched a linear profile of the plate and used revolve with thin feature. With the bowl revolved I used dome to create a rounded foot ring and filleted all the plates edges for a softer finish.

To create the embossed Holly design, I created 4 copies of the plate. The reason for this was because I couldn’t apply the whole Holly design at once, it would wrap as one whole shape. If I were to wrap into the same plate layering the wrap features, this would also become messy and you don’t get the desired effect. So using the Holly DXF file I wrapped the Holly leaves onto plate one. I then wrapped each Holly berry one at a time onto each of the other plates until each plate had a wrap design embossed onto them. Before I combined the plates into one solid body, I applied fillets to each wrap.

Before I used circular pattern on the Holly design, I applied the appearances, and while using circular pattern I ensured propagate visual properties was ticked so that when the design patterned, it patterned with the appearance attached, this can save a lot of time with more detailed appearance work.

To finish off the design, I added a small embossed design around the plate lip and filleted all the joining edges of the embossed designs so that it is more realistic as a ceramic ‘glazed’ plate.

 

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.