Faberge Egg

thingiverse

I wanted to make a unique Easter egg for my wife, so I fired up Blender and started playing around with ways of wrapping a texture onto a spheroid. I found that mapping a basic diamond grid onto a UV sphere would result in a nice spiral pattern, so I added some little flower shapes and a photo frame outline then applied the texture as a displacement map. The "top" and "bottom" STLs have an inner wall and can be printed without any rafts or supports. Just make sure you have good adhesion on that first layer or you'll end up with a whole lot of spaghetti like I did with the first attempt! If you want to make your own egg design, load up the Blender file and replace the texture file with any image you like. Ideally it should be square and tile-able, but you can use a photo if you don't mind having a seam down the back of your egg. Once you save out the STL you'll have a solid egg, I hollowed mine out by importing it into 3D Builder and then subtracting the "Egg_inside" object from it. This is preferable to using a Solidify or similar operation because you don't need all the surface detail to be replicated on the inner surface. The stand is just a simple ring shape with legs made from this "Ornamental Flourish" object: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:934503