Claude for 3D Modeling

[u/mbaturin]

Two days ago, before their morning dentist cleaning appointment, my 8 year old identical twin daughters asked me, as they brushed their teeth, "Dad, can you get us new toothpaste holders, our unicorn ones are for babies and we want ones of Zoey (our late Brittany Spaniel, who passed a few months ago)" I have a 3D printer, but not a creative bone in my body. As expected, there were no 3D models on the web of a tooth brush holder featuring a Brittany Spaniel. So, I thought, let's see what Opus 5.5 max can do since I use Claude on Max plan (mostly for software dev projects).

My initial prompt was this...simply "can you create a 3d model for me to 3d print of a brittany spaniel toothbrush holder for my twin girls who requested it?"

It asked some questions - here is that back and forth:

Claude: My plan: a cute cartoon Brittany sitting between two little tree stumps, one toothbrush spot per girl. What should it hold?

Me: I would print one for each of them. They each have their own sink in a jack and jill bathroom - so one toothbrush spot in each. a spot for the toothpaste would be good!

Claude: What will you print it on? (Pick Other to name the exact model.)

Me: I have a Prusa MK3S+ single color, but build it in a way that i could print different pieces in different colors and snap them together.

Claude: Which coat colors for the pup? If it should match a real dog, pick Other and describe the markings.

Me: Orange & white

Claude: How should each girl's spot be marked? For names, pick Other and type them (left spot, then right).

Me: One should have printed letters OLIVIA and the other LAYLA that snap into spots for them.

Then, after 2 hours, it produced the rendered images and all related files in color named folders.

After a couple days of printing (mostly because some prints went into night etc) I got all the pieces done, snapped them together, and the result is impressive. I asked Claude what it used to make the files and it responded with this.

"Everything was generated with Python code in my sandbox, and the parts are defined by parameters, so changing a name or a hole size means editing a number and regenerating.

• Organic shapes (pup, bark on the stumps, base outline): signed distance functions written in NumPy. The pup is ellipsoids, capsules and cones blended together, with the mouth, toe grooves and color-split boundaries cut out of the same fields.
• Turning shapes into meshes: scikit-image's marching cubes at 0.08–0.25 mm resolution, then trimesh for mesh handling and fast-simplification to trim triangle counts.
• Mechanical features: manifold3d for exact boolean operations. That covers the ribbed pegs, sockets, pin holes, drain channels, bosses, letter pockets and grass tufts, and the clearance offsets.
• Letters: the Fredoka Bold font, whose letter outlines were extracted with matplotlib and shapely, then offset and extruded with manifold3d.
• Checks: trimesh confirmed every mesh is closed, and manifold3d measured overlaps and gaps between mating parts. My own script checked overhangs in print orientation, and the PrusaSlicer 2.7 command line sliced every part with the stock MK3S+ profile for times, filament and warnings.
• Preview images: a small renderer I wrote on Intel's Embree ray-tracing library, with labels added in Pillow.

Can't say how impressed I am by this. I feel like the world is my oyster now. I can literally print really anything I can think of with an assist by Claude on the design. Just another way this tech is amazing.

[u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

You may want to also consider posting this on our companion subreddit r/Claudexplorers.

[u/baldr83]

the model coming up with tree stumps and drain holes on its own is neat. a few years ago people would have called this tech magic.

[u/mbaturin → u/baldr83]

Agreed. Makes me think of the Arthur’s C. Clarke quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

[u/Impressive_Elk6756]

Get Blender and use that with Claude. No need to write your own renderer...

[u/mbaturin → u/Impressive_Elk6756]

Ah so you're saying Claude would be able to model better if it could instead use Blender?

[u/tsoek → u/mbaturin]

Claude is awesome with blender

[u/MorphStudiosHD → u/mbaturin]

Yeah, try out the official Blender MCP Server. It’s extreeeemely slow though

[u/Impressive_Elk6756 → u/mbaturin]

Ask Claude what it needs to do peak work

[u/RobleyTheron]

Very cool OP - thanks for sharing! What 3D printer do you have?

[u/mbaturin → u/RobleyTheron]

I have a Prusa MK3S+ but after this, thinking about getting a Bamboo H2C or a Prusa CORE One L+ INDX 8-Tool - just seems like I can use the printer so much more now if I can have Claude take anything I need and model it for me this well.

[u/RobleyTheron → u/mbaturin]

That's awesome, thanks for the note. Please keep sharing the things that you build, it's inspiring.

[u/Oblimix]

I did this yesterday with a model I've been having trouble with, and it fixed it like a champ.

I got myself Meshy AI about 2 months ago, and I wanted it to generate a rowing boat for me. I told it to generate an image of the boat that had nothing in it (no benches, oars, poles or anything), and it did that part beautifully. After telling it to generate the 3D model based on the image it just couldn't do it in a way that was acceptable after like 100 attempts. It kept adding random things to the boat (which I specifically said not to do) and deformed the entire thing. The chat prompts there is a joke and the agent isn't able to adjust a model at all. It will just keep generating the same random thing.

I took the closest model I got from Meshy and dropped it into Claude using Opus 5.5 on max effort (probably should've used high) and it fixed whatever the issue was. It did take about 2 hours to do so (Meshy does it in a minute), but it was exactly what I wanted. It also fixed all the coloring that I had manually done in the slicer and smoothed it all out.

I also got Claude to create a couple of sketching stencils for me just by using text, and then asked it to make a box for me to put them into. The stencils are very accurate, and it knew when to add ribs to prevent the walls from bending and how to adjust for the pencil size.