I cheated slightly and modelled this in Autodesk Fusion 360 (also free if you’re a student), but you could use Meshmixer – it would just take a bit longer to get accurate measurements.
Lastly, a neck section measured off the original light fitting was added. By selecting both the shell and the cylinder together, the “Boolean Difference” command became available, subtracting the cylinder section from the shell. A cylinder was added from the “Meshmix” menu and placed in the centre. To allow the light fitting within the shell, a larger opening was needed at the top. For this design I ended up with 3 different thicknesses around the shell. This was a slow process of using the brush selection tool to remove areas, before repeating step 2 with slightly thicker geometry. I wanted to create an interesting pattern when the light was turned on, so separated several areas of a copy of the original mesh to be used to create thicker sections. So that the shell would allow a lot of light through, I used a 0.7mm thickness for the overall design. Scale up the shell to the appropriate size, then use the “Extrusion” tool to thicken the skin into a solid shell. 
In Meshmixer, this simply involves using the “Inspector” tool under the “Analysis” menu.
Fill any holes and errors in the 3D scanned sea urchin shell. The process took a little time, but has been outlined in 6 basic steps below: Additionally, it’s quite useful when you are working with 3D scan files, which are typically a mesh like a STL or OBJ. If you don’t have access to expensive CAD programs, good news this project was completely designed in free software! I’ve used Autodesk Meshmixer for many of my tutorials and posts, it’s a surprisingly powerful tool and a must for anyone involved in 3D printing. However, as anyone familiar with 3D scanning will know, this model is just a skin with no thickness or solid geometry, and was just the starting point for the design process. 
This resulted in a full-colour, highly detailed model of the shell, as shown to the right. I n this post I’ll go over the main processes and experiments I went through to get the finished product, but in case you’re just here for the big finale, here’s the link so you can download the final Sea Urchin Light exclusively from my Pinshape account and 3D print as many as you like! 3D ScanningĪs explained in further detail in my previous post, I used an EinScan Pro 2X Plus 3D scanner, which included a turntable to automatically capture all angles of the sea urchin shell. At the time I didn’t know what I’d do with it, but fast forward a year and I’ve found a perfect application turning the sea urchin shell into ceiling light covers in my house. About a year ago I posted about 3D scanning some shells, and as part of the scanning I captured a sea urchin shell.
This project has been a little while in the making and it’s exciting to finally be writing about it.
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