How to Create a 3D Model of a Bottle

Hello everybody and welcome to this tutorial in which I show you how we can design a soap bottle like this in Shapr3D. 

We will start this exercise by creating a very interesting sketch setup. And then via refinements create various body design studies. You can see from the first to the second to the third some of the details started to change just a little bit, and then we will go ahead and slice the bottle and then create all the necessary and functional requirements - details like openings, tubes, and material thickness. 

Bring everything into the Visualization tool to explore materials. Take a look at the different ways as to how to explain a design, and then also make an excursion into the new Webviewer so you could present your work to somebody who is far away or doesn't have Shapr3D yet.

And with all that, let's do it. So, we will start with a new design. Let's make sure we go to the top view. Millimeters is our unit system, and we have all these sketch elements turned on. Then let's go to Sketch and we will start with an ellipse. Click at the origin. Click upwards and click to the side and quickly sketch out an ellipse.

Then the width is 35 millimeters and the depth is 28. Now in 3D view this sketch, let’s make a copy 120 millimeters off the ground. Click copy. Click on the top arrow and type in 120. If you click on the ellipse, then you can change the dimension.

Now the depth is actually 38 and the width now is 45 millimeters. Now you need another copy. There is nothing selected, so you can also go to transform, select, move, then select the ellipse, click copy, click on the up arrow, type in 120 and enter and done. This ellipse, we're going to change a lot. The width is actually 10 millimeters and the depth 28, so very narrow.

What we have now is a bottom, a mid and a top profile, and we can create a loft body. This body looks pretty good. However, if we go into a front view and we pay attention to it, we notice that the top and the bottom ends are kind of flat, only the center is just nicely curved, so this body is not ideal.

Let's delete it. What we need, however, is guide rails from the sides and the front. So let's go to the front. These guide rails are very easy to make, so we can create a curve network. Click sketch, then we will select this Fit point spline. There are magenta points: these are the snapping points where this sketch intersects the ellipses.

Click on each intersection point and right click to stop everything and 3D view. We can actually quickly sketch this. Let's go to a side view, and then repeat the same.

Right click and there should be the last sketch and right. So, if you now select the three profiles and then select the four Rails and click Loft, go to your front view, you can really see how beautiful this works out. Even more interesting is, and sort of modeling it this way, let's go to Tool Loft. These profiles and then click on the rail can really see how the surface is being pulled to these rails.

This is actually now our raw body. Let's hide this for a moment. We'll go to a side view. Go to Line. Let’s simply use the grid to draw here a line, nicely centered left and right, and then this line you can lock so it doesn't move. Then I will draw another line maybe to there and a line to there. So roughly 203 millimeters. Very good. And now when you zoom in on top, we can have a nice curved top part. So let's go to Spline and we select the control point. As you can see, this spline is not flowing nicely into the line. To do this, we can select the spline and the line and select tangent constraint. Pull this one here just to show you what happens. You see how the point actually was aligned to be tangent to this line? Now everything is a little bit irregular, so let's at the center of the grid, create a line. This line, now we lock, and then you can select two pairs of points, click symmetry and add a symmetry constraint. And let's do the same here. Pay attention to what happens now. You see all the points are symmetrical now. Now and then we can sculpt this a little bit as we want. Very good. Okay, let's go into 3D view again, and this profile you can extrude, and then move back.

Let's show our previous loft body. You see they intersect, which means we can select both parties and then go to intersect and find actually the intersection. Pretty good and pretty easy. As you can see. We take a look in the front. We can study this. Now, this looks good at the beginning, but at the end, it is kind of like a little bit too curved at the bottom.

This is too pointy and also the top actually, we could make it to be more arched. So let's select this body, and then we move this to one side, 200 millimeters, just as a copy.

There we are. And let's hide this for the moment. Let’s go back to the side view. Select this sketch and then move it. A little bit like this so that this arc is now more like an ellipse, and you see how the surface actually really goes much more accelerated to the top. We can even show the previous geometry because it's at a different plane as an underlay.

Very good. So let's create actually these two bodies, one more.

There is the loft body. We can hide this one and then go to the extrude command and this new body will extrude. Bring this back. There we are. Into this one more time, intersect. Let's go to the front view, show the other model and look at the difference. This looks so much better here now, and the bottom is quite a little bit wider.

This problem is now solved. Not necessarily the top because this is very linear because we just do an extrusion of this profile. So what we need is actually a different body that cuts this. So we'll select this body, move this over 100 to there. Let’s also create a new folder.

And these two bodies we can move into this folder, and right click to rename the folder. Let’s call this “Study”. So what we need to do is to quickly rebuild this body one more time.

There we are, hide this. And then along this line and this spline and this line, let’s sweep a convex profile. We go to add a construction plane and then we will select perpendicular to edge, this edge perpendicular at the start points there. When we select this plane, which is, as you can see now, angle.

Click on the new sketch. There we have the snap point where this plane intersects. With this line, we can zoom out a little bit more. We can draw a nice line, 100 millimeters, 25 up, and then on the left side, 25 up because of the snapping targets. This is now perfect. And then let's go to Spline, Fit Point from the left to there to the right and right click.

This is a very gentle arc, so we can push this further inwards. However we need to sweep this profile along these three sketch elements. Select Sweep. This is actually very tight at the corner.

We can get away with this. This is really the important surface. We will select now these bodies and subtract and look at this. How beautiful is this cut? If I go to the front view, you can really see how this is nicely arched. Very good. Click done.

And even the bottom part is actually rounder. I think at this point we could say this is actually really good. So our initial modeling for the bottle body is actually done.

Before we continue, let's actually clean up our design. The structure's a little bit chaotic. Let’s make a new folder. Let's rename this folder as Sketches, and then all the sketches I put into this folder and bring this one down to there. I would like to move the study objects to the left by 100 millimeters, and then the final piece, let’s make a copy and move it also 100 millimeters to the left and then this copy and move into the studies folder, and then we can hide everything.

So you see now everything is nice and clean. The next task, what we would like to do is start slicing the bottle horizontally into the cap, which also has a lid, so a second slice and the bottle. But we would actually cut these edges. So before we do this, a good exercise is rounding these edges.

We can play with the value. Five millimeters feels very good for the base, and then we can take a look at the top slide. Make it two millimeters.

Now, we would like to have it from the top. Down 20 millimeters and down 20 millimeters. So how can we actually slice this?

That's easy. Do it from the bottom because this is a flat plane. Create a construction plane straight up. Then zoom in and move it up till it does not intersect with the bottle. And if you want, you can also clean it up a little bit by 236 millimeters. Now maybe move the other one up by half a millimeter there.

This is a little bit eyeballed, but this works actually really good. Also, be mindful, injection molded parts have a lot of irregularities. So this plane, now we actually moved down minus 20 millimeters. So this is now the position for the first cut where we actually slice the cap or lid. So let's select the whole body.

Select the plane, and then we say split. There we are. So now this, we move down another negative 20 millimeters and then the base, we split with this plane. And this plane, just move into this sketch folder, so it's gone. Now you see there is actually our bottle. And give this a name. This maybe we call cap, and then this we can call lid or give those names, which make sense to you.

Now, at one point we also want to call these elements out. Also have tubes inside. So what will be the easiest one to start is actually the lid. So you see the other edges are rounded. So now we can select the plane on the bottom and then select the shell command. We can do a 1 millimeter shell.

And beautifully you see, it also creates all the inside details for us automatically. This one is done. Let's go to the cap. So when the lid sits on the cap, we want to have a cavity for a nail to poke under the lid and move it up. o we don't have this cavity yet. This is something we're going to build first before we then do the same thing, like with the lid and core the bottom part out.

Let’s select the top face. Go to sketch and then we can use the arc. Use the grid here to do something that is nice and even left and right and there is the arc. Very good. To do a quick measurement, simply draw a line here in between two millimeters. So these two points you can select and lock.

Now if you zoom in now, draw a line. Now this is 1.5. Looks nearly like two millimeters. Okay, so if we were to cut this open, we can see with the lid, it would be a little bit under the lid opening. So there's like a small opening.

So you see prototype is actually really easy to continue. Let's add another arc to the outside. This one can be much bigger and here comes now the interesting trick, why direct modeling in Shapr3D is really so good. This profile, now extrude into the body, maybe really deep, and then say new body.

And then this face we will move simply backwards. And based on how far we move this back, you’ll see we get a different cut section or intersection.

The majority of this face will be cut. So from this body, remove this body via, subtract, now, originals we want to keep. This looks actually pretty decent.

This edge, we can round 4 millimeters, and then this sharp edge and this one too, make it 0.25 millimeter. We add a nice detail and look, this tiny filet really makes this look more realistic. So the front detail is done and now we can work on the opening for the fluid to go through.

First, we have to shell the bottom one millimeter. And when you select this inner face, now looking from the bottom click sketch, you see now that actually it zooms right onto it. We can go to circle. At the origin, again, draw a circle, five millimeters. There we are, and six millimeters. And then lock the center point.

The smaller profile that is actually when we extrude this up that cuts the hole and then the bigger profile, move this up, but then say, union. So we join this extrusion to the body. Now the shell has the thickness of one millimeter. 2.7 - this means this extrudes up 1.7 millimeters. You see when we move this up and down how this actually changes.

Select the cylinder outer face and change this to seven millimeters. We make this bigger. Let's give this a nice rounding. With that, the upper part is done. 

Now we can do the next, which is inside. Click on the circle that activates the sketch again, go to the circle tool and create one circle 20 millimeters. This is now where the neck or the tube coming from the bottle has its inner diameter, then we can do 22, like a thicker one. This is now everything for what goes to the bottle and now we need inside and outside also a sleeve that slides over it.

So here, 18 millimeters and then 24. Again, this is for the bottle and the other is for the cap. Select these two profiles. Extrude those down 10 millimeters. 

We can now actually turn the cap off. Turn the bottle. Zoom in and then here, this is what is for the bottle. We can bring this one down. It cuts into, and we will say, union. Join the two parts. Keep it like this for the moment. So we go to a front view, quickly turn the section view on, and there you can see how this sits on it.

Let's turn the section view off. Turn the cap on. Turn the lid on, because what now we would like to do is select this inner profile, extrude it up and extrude it so far up so it penetrates through the lid and then you can select to union. So we have this extrusion. This sticks out. No big problem selected to faces, press delete and thanks to direct modeling, it's gone. 

This is actually a very solid piece, so what we can do here is use the shell command to shell this to the inside. The shelling command is not a very complicated task. So, for example here, 0.4. This is also fine when there should be a really thin surface, but we will actually do something different. Not with the shell command, however, we will actually select the sketch and do another offset to the inside by one millimeter.

Very good. And then this inner element we move up and check out what we’re going to do. Now hide the sketch, and select flat face. Then select the curved face and say Replace face. And what's happening is when you zoom in, you can see now that this flat interface got moved up and follows perfectly the curved face.

Now I can see where it sits inside. So lid and cap are actually done. Let's take a look at what we do with the bottle. So the cap can actually slide onto the bottleneck, but then it can rotate. So we want to prevent this rotation. What we will do in this case, move the face down by maybe half a millimeter, not too much there.
And then when we take a look at the bottle, you can see how this intersects with the bottle, both bodies selected. Then subtract this time, however, say you would like to keep the removed body. In our case here, we have to change the order.
So magenta plus, that means that's the piece something is removed from and blue minus that means that is the geometry that's being removed. And we zoom in here. There we can see actually this stepping click done. Turn off the cap and there we are. You see, that's how easy you can generate this detail. No sketches. Simply direct modeling. Select this edge 0.25 for the rounding to make this look nice and good.

Then we can select this edge 0.25. Again, this is like a nice detail. When we then go into the visual, you will see that what is left is actually now the shelling of the inside part to help the software do a little trick. You see, we removed the inner faces. Then select a top face and simply say, here you shell by 2 millimeters.

Now, the material thickness is 2 millimeters, and this is actually a tick too big. you can make this 20 millimeters. This perfectly lines up. If I go to a front view, there we are. Turn all this on one more time and check the section view.

This sketch I can also now put there, and at this point we have actually created our design, the lid, cap and the bottle, including details for fitting and shelling. And we're ready to put this into the visualizer. 

To start the Visualization tool, click on it.

There we are. Now we have actually our normally shaded body. There, you can already see the nice highlights and shadows of these fills we created.

We can give the lid and the cap a polycarbonate plastic material. There we are. Then let's click on change, and then we can change this color. We have, for example, the HEX number right now. That is #007780. So it is actually kind of like a dark blue. Then let's go to Environments. Select, for example, the Colored mood.

And then when we go to Gradient Mood, we have a nice gradient in the background that is also good. Click on the adjustment. We can rotate the light a little bit. It's actually really nice. And then for the background color, we will go with #7AC1D2. So it's a nice bluish, watery look.

And the bottle is kind of grayish. That's not very attractive. So we can now decide what type of material we would like to give for that one. So for example, we can use the polypropylene material. Then this, we can change to something more whiteish. Now be careful actually that we cannot really produce a perfect white material.

So maybe something more yellowish or so, or like a blue white. So select a blue hue and you can drag this along to tint this just a little bit. We can also swap out materials. So for example here, this can be polycarbonate, and glossy, or transparent.

How would this look when I will select a glossy, transparent polypropylene? You can see much more now in it. So you see, it's actually really nice and easy to adjust materials. You have two bodies. If you now click on the polypropylene one more time and change the color for the material, you see it.

It adjusts the material on both parts because both parts use the same material. Now to create really interesting presentations you see also here we have a beautiful highlight on the fillet. Nice highlights on the glassy surface. It really comes down to the position. Do I look really from the front, or from the bottom up?
From the top down. We’re painting kind of like with light, so this can be actually a good look. Then we’ll can go back to Environments. Go to the gradient mood and further play with it. You can increase the light, can decrease the light, and can rotate the shadow or basically can rotate the light.

And by this, we pay attention to what nice shading do we get on the bottle, for example. Now with the light coming from the right, you can really see nicely the structure of the material on the front.

Or, you can do it this way now the light comes from the left side, but then you don't really have these highlights. What's going on there and then moving the view a little bit, trying to play and make this look really nice. Then, then we can click on capture, and that basically then creates an image of this for a presentation.

We can also actually share our design via the web. So we can click on share, then create a unique link. Then the software will create an online link with this product in it and we can share it. Open this in the browser and there we have it. Very good. Now we can just rotate around. We can, by the way, also change designs.

So for example, the material you would like for the bottle to be a little bit more bluish. And then this change you can publish again. So the link will be the same, but it will, once this publishing is finished, show the new material choice.

You see we adjusted the color and with this, we have reached the end of this demonstration. We hope everything that we showed you will be informative and support you in your design and visualization endeavor.

Here you can also watch a video of a water bottle being modeled.

How can I make my own 3D models?

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Is making a 3D model easy?

Most 3D modeling and CAD tools are outdated when it comes to their ease-of-use and user interface. Shapr3D bridges the gap by allowing you to create precision models with an intuitive interface. Whether you’re a professional or an amateur we believe you’ll love using Shapr3D on all of your devices. 

What software is used for 3D modeling?

There’s a wide range of text that professionals use for 3D modeling, and your choice will vary depending on your use case and professional environment. If you’re looking to model manufacturable and precise items then Shapr3D is the perfect option. For animation and highly organic models Blender is a recommended option.