Bottle Modeling Tricks

There are a lot of cool things you can do with bottle modeling. Some of these are just tricks of the shell command. These don’t just apply to bottles, but liquid containers of any type.

One thing you can do is model the frozen liquid, and the use the shell to create the bottle with the “shell outward” option. Very cool tool that’s been in there for a very long time.

There’s also the multiple thickness options, which enable you to create the neck or base of a bottle in one thickness, and the rest a different thickness. Of course this doesn’t usually actually matter much, because with blow molding you aren’t actually creating tooling for the inside of the bottle. It is nice, however, to help you get an overall weight or a center of gravity prediction for the empty and filled bottles.

And then of course are all of the cool things you can do with filling up the shelled out bottle with liquid.

The Intersect tool is very useful in this situation. You can get fill levels, container volumes, and of course all of the cool visualizations SW enables you to do.

And of course the surfacing functions in SW you unlimited access to complex shapes for your bottles, limited really only by your imagination, your skill, and the amount of time you’re willing to put into your project.

Don’t forget regular mechanical solid modeling that you can use for the lids and screw connections, and of course the mold geometry for CNC and EDM tools.

It’s always fun to work on bottles. Of course remember to use recyclable materials, make it easy to reuse your products, and think about what’s going to happen to the item when it’s main purpose is done.