Video: Heart Bowl Packaging
Lately I’ve been making several heart bowls to post for sale on my website: Corbin’s Workshop. To ship them, I normally would haphazardly wrap up the product in a bunch of old packaging material, put it in a used Amazon box and send it on its way. This worked great for reusing and repurposing old materials that might otherwise get thrown out. I tend to save old cardboard boxes just for this purpose, but a lot of times they aren’t quite the right size I need.
I decided I wanted my customers to have a better unboxing experience when they open up one of my fancy bowls. I am charging a lot for them, so I figured it was time to start paying attention to more of the details. Apple is well known for this, and spends a lot of thought on their packaging.
I looked around my shop and had some leftover pink foam board insulation. I figured it would be really easy to CNC carve into a package.
The part that was difficult was figuring out how to design it in CAD. Usually I would start with a 3D square box and perform an intersection with my bowl to get a cavity. I quickly realized this wouldn’t work with organic shapes, like my lotus bowl shown below:
Imagine taking this shape and pushing it into sand. Eventually it starts flowing into the bowl due to the low level on the lips. Any concave portions would also get stuck.
My solution was to take the bowl shapes and import them into Blender. I could then use a feature called “Geometry Nodes” to mathematically make all upward facing faces go to the top, creating a solid shape.
Here’s what the shapes look like in Blender for both the Heart Bowl and Lotus Bowl:
If you are interested, let me know and I can send a copy of the Geometry nodes tree to you via email.
I could then import these shapes back into Fusion and create the necessary bowl cavity out of a virtual square box.
Machining the foam was fast and easy, but it did take a few iterations to get the dimensions just right to have it fit in a little loose.
