Maker Space - Fruit Ninja It!

Written By Patricia Giang

I had a great brainwave last week…..Fruit Ninja it. The thing I wanted to tackle but I was slightly avoiding it, was using Onshape to make organic shaped parts, reason: so I could finally design a pumpkin for Halloween!

You may be familiar with the Fruit Ninja game, you chop fruit as it flys at you into smaller pieces.

Well pumpkins you cut into sliced wedges for baking. So I decided to try modelling in 3D a wedge rather than a whole pumpkin because I knew you could duplicate shapes to make the whole pumpkin to get the bumpy curved surface.

So here are a series of images of my Fruit Ninja approach to pumpkin 3D modelling….bit of iteration involved but it worked pretty well.

I’d love to hear what you do mentally when you try to tackle your 3D design challenges! How do you break it down? Are you a detailed planner with lots of drawings, or a random attack the problem kind of creator by trying lots of different mediums and approaches?

#1 Butternut pumpkin

#2 Pumpkin wedge

#3 Pumpkin wedge but designed on a QLD jack type pumpkin rather than the hourglass shape of the butternut pumpkin wedge

#4 Pumpkin in Onshape with 2 different wedge designs to give the bumpy surface I wanted and a funny teapot hat looking stalk

#5 3D printing pumpkins, but I’m still working on the design to get the perfect pumpkin…..maybe it will be ready for next Halloween :)

Patricia Giang