Design of the Week: I LOVE YOU FOREVER

This week’s selection is the romantic “I LOVE YOU FOREVER” by Lloyd Hopanda.

Hopanda, based in Pasig City in the Philippines, is a designer who also offers 3D print services locally. He recently published a rather appropriate 3D model for the upcoming Valentine’s day.

From the image at top, you’d think it was simply a cute “I Love You message”, something quite useful for Valentine’s Day. But wait — there’s more. Check out this short video:

Yes, it’s a multi-view design. From one side it says “I Love You” and the other view says “Forever”. Very cute, and certainly something you might want to 3D print for this week.

What I am wondering is how exactly one designs this type of object. Making text structures is quite straightforward in CAD programs: just type and extrude. You can even place the letters adjacent to each other on the curvy course. But how do you overlay them?

If done poorly, the view “A” might disturb view “B” of the corresponding letter position.

One way might be to extrude a subtractive element from each letter in the other letter’s direction. That could clip off bits of the other letter without messing with its optical view. Then this would have to be repeated from the other letter’s viewpoint.

Tricky, but doable.

It would be terrific if there were a CAD utility to automatically generate this type of structure, but I’m not aware of one.

On the other hand, you could just download and print this item from Thingiverse, but do so quickly before Valentine’s Day! Well done, Lloyd!

Via Thingiverse and Reddit