Procedural Lamp Shades for 3D Printing

Play with generating lamp shades

I didn’t have any lamp shades in my appartment since moving out from my parents place. I’ve decided to change that and have some fun while doing it by building a generator for lamp shades.

How it works

In order to test my setup with three.js.

I’ve started by generating n-gons. A hexagon in this example.

In order to make the result a bit more visually appealing I then modulated the distance from the center (radius) of each vertex using a sine wave. This results in some interesting shapes due to aliasing.

To move into the third dimension I extrude the shape and shift the phase of the sine wave a bit in order to twist the resulting shape.

3D Printed results

Here is what one of the models looks like in the real world. 3D printed in vase mode (as a single spiral of extruded plastic) out of PETG using a 0.8mm nozzle.