Treasures of the Heart

Meet Tatiana! She works with instructor Mirena as part of Game-U’s New York Accelerate program. Tatiana’s all about visual arts and making things beautiful, so it’s no surprise that she quickly took to 3D modeling in Maya and TinkerCAD. Check out her heart-shaped jewelry box!

Drawing inspiration from Thingiverse, a gallery of 3D models, Tatiana used two programs – the accessible, web-based TinkerCAD, and the professional modeling and animation software, Maya – to develop her jewelry box’s geometry. The project began in TinkerCAD, where Tatiana used primitive shapes and simple transforms to hammer out the box’s underlying structure. Transform operations like rotate and scale act on primitive shapes to customize them for a particular purpose. For example, Tatiana scaled a hollow heart primitive higher and wider to create the jewelry box, and flattened, stretched, and rotated a solid heart primitive to model the matched lid. Once Tatiana finalized the shape of the box and the lid in TinkerCAD, she moved into Maya to sculpt the fine details!

After importing the TinkerCAD file into Maya, Tatiana used text objects to add her name to the lid. Next, she centered the text position and even added some abstract designs beneath it to give the surface more interest. Maya’s advanced transform and geometry tools gave Tatiana the ability to polish her model still further, ensuring that the pieces fit together properly and that the model’s size would be appropriate for its purpose. Between classes, instructor Mirena printed the complete design on the studio’s 3D printer, so Tatiana could take it home and put it to use!

Beautiful work on a practical object, Tatiana! You’ve got an eye for beauty and symmetry. It’s often difficult to model objects that print well in 3D, but your jewelry box proves that you’re up to the challenge. Thanks for sharing it with us! Keep making beautiful things.