{"id":1054,"date":"2014-07-26T14:56:20","date_gmt":"2014-07-26T14:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/?p=1054"},"modified":"2014-08-26T22:13:35","modified_gmt":"2014-08-26T22:13:35","slug":"3d-printed-spherical-dice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/1054","title":{"rendered":"Design for magical spherical dice (3D printed)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/sketchfab.com\/models\/33f70f7cb7f94a83836a05ccc4142135\/embed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen=\"true\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"true\" onmousewheel=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I designed a die.  It&#8217;s special because it&#8217;s a sphere pretending to have six sides: each roll will end with one to six dots facing up.  It&#8217;s also special because you can print a copy.  The trick is a weight that  falls into one of six pockets under each of the numbers. &#8220;Spherical dice&#8221; sounds better than &#8220;spherical die,&#8221; so print two.  <\/p>\n<p>Some assembly is required: You just have to drop in the weight and jam in the plug. According to the colleague that helped me, <a href=\"http:\/\/www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp\/~ume\/\">Nobuyuki Umetani<\/a>, fishing stores are the best place to get lead.  For the plug, you can use your thumb.  Most of the plug will still be sticking out post-jam and you&#8217;ll have to snap off the rest.  The way many printers print makes them snap clean along the path of the printer head. So score the plug by drawing a knife around it&#8217;s diameter where it meets the sphere, steady it (with a vice or on the edge of a table), and give it a good whack.  <\/p>\n<h3>Notes<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>The roll has satisfying action. Video at bottom.<\/li>\n<li>The plug is tapered so as to jam well.  It functions as the number one.  <\/li>\n<li>With this design, the strength of the jam may influence the fairness of the die. Probably not a real concern (since the ball&#8217;s mid-air choice of pockets will have a bigger influence on the outcome), but this is an imperfection in the design. Someone will have to do a few thousand or so rolls to make sure. <\/li>\n<li>The density of the fill and the weight of the missing dots could also influence a die&#8217;s fairness, but if you care that much then you know not to bet six with any dice that didn&#8217;t come through a casino.  <\/li>\n<li>You can fill the dots in if you want them to stand out. Nail polish will do.  Just be careful: the plastic doesn&#8217;t forgive mistakes because its layers act like capillaries and suck up liquidy paint (or nail polish removered nail polish)<\/li>\n<li>You want the diameter of the lead weight to leave some wiggle in the pockets.  If your weight is a snug fit into the die, get a smaller weight (or scale up the size of the model).  <\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve oriented the model at an angle so that it&#8217;ll print correctly (without any support material on the inside) if your printer can handle printing a 45\u00b0 overhang. It probably can? I don&#8217;t know how common that is, but the machine I used can.<\/li>\n<li>The original design subtracted an octahedron from the center of the sphere, but it was a little too sensitive, and also harder to make fair, so I redesigned it to subtract three mutually orthogonal boxes.<\/li>\n<li>Workflow was 123D (for the orthogonal part) to Meshmixer (to sculpt out the dots) to MakerWare (staging and path planning) to a second generation Replicator. <\/li>\n<li>I got the idea from someone who did the same thing in wood.  I saw it for sale at a store call <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aha-zurich.ch\/en\/\">Aha<\/a>. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And, this is how I roll:<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/104452842?app_id=122963\" width=\"557\" height=\"990\" frameborder=\"0\" title=\"Magical spherical die, 3D print\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I designed a die. It&#8217;s special because it&#8217;s a sphere pretending to have six sides: each roll will end with one to six dots facing up. It&#8217;s also special because you can print a copy. The trick is a weight that falls into one of six pockets under each of the numbers. &#8220;Spherical dice&#8221; sounds &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/1054\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Design for magical spherical dice (3D printed)<\/span><\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":[],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1054"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1089,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions\/1089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}