Truncated Octahedron

I came across the truncated octahedron during my Honours studies, researching shapes that would fill 3D spaces without leaving any gaps. Now that I have the time to get back to some of these ideas, I’m quickly blowing the Solidworks file size into the hundreds of MB’s! But the great thing about this shape is that it can print on the ‘Up! Plus 2’ 3D printer without any support structure, and is strong enough to stand on. In this photo you can see the CAD file and one of my 3D prints of a segment.

I’m currently looking at combining all the parts into a solid body as it seems to save a substantial amount of MB’s when converted to an STL file if everything is joined – I guess because there are less individual surfaces all intersecting. Just a pain to do!

– Posted by James Novak