Another ‘Blender goes wrong’ video.
This is a combination of two tutorials from YouTube. The first was making a twisted vase, the second was making a laser effect and slicing a cube. The ‘problem ‘goes wrong’ stems, once again, from the director rushing through without checking everything is safe.
One of the things people do with 3D printers is print vases. They aren’t normally useful as vases since the prints are difficult to make waterproof, but they can be decorative.
So a simple twisted vase was a thing I made a month or so ago. I used a deform modifier and multiple twisting modifiers to make the vase into an interesting shape.

Laser cube cutting
The cube cutting was a more complex proposal. Although the instructional video by “Blender Made Easy” was about 30 minutes long, it took me rather longer than that to finish.
However, this tutor is one of the good ones. There’s no ‘rest of the owl’ here, the tricky parts are gone through and exactly recreating the cube cutting can be done even by a bear of little brain.
The animation is a bit of smoke and mirrors. The first thing to do is slice a cube. Then give the pieces physics (rigid body physics in this case) and animate when they become active parts of the scene. Once they are active, they obey gravity and fall to the floor.
Then you make a path for the laser cutter to follow before modelling a laser pencil and the laser beam itself, which follow the path. This is the cutting of the cube and is the most basic version that could be used as an animation.

The use of ‘dynamic paint’ added an extra layer. Here, the laser beam is made to act like a brush and ‘paint’ a red glow on the cut surfaces of the cube. This is made to fade over a short time but it looks like the pieces are heated up by the laser then cool down.
Sparks add a further layer. This is done by generating particles and turning those particles into small yellow spheres. Adding motion blur to the animation means that the sparks don’t look like spheres in the final version.

To make the thing more my own, I changed a few things. First, the path that the laser takes is changed to go above the cube. Second, a vase is positioned and cut by the laser. Then background bits – a marble slab for the vase to sit on and a few more vases to fill out the scene.
The wall is modelled on many walls I have seen in various labs. Bumpy green plastic panels separated by smooth plastic joints gives a workshop feel to the animation. They also help give a scale to the whole animation.
Finally, sounds to make the whole thing come alive. Sound effect of the laser cut, metal sliding on metal and the vase shattering were all available on Pixabay. There’s a background of ‘workshop noise’ that fills in the soundscape. It was a matter of getting the timing right before rendering the whole thing and putting it on YouTube.
Final cut

























