The Janurary period at MIT is called IAP (Independent Activities Period) and is a time for students to explore new things. For IAP 2024, with Alayah Hines, I explored low temperature metal casting. We decided to make a custom Settlers of Catan board. The plan was to design all the pieces in Fusion 360, 3D print them, make a silicone mold, and then cast the pieces in metal.
We're still working on finishing the metal casting part, but we had access to a few Bambu X1 Carbon 3D printers which can print in multiple colors and thought it be cool to show off a multi-color 3D printed board.
Design Goals
There were a lot of pieces to design
- 5 resource tiles (wood, brick, wheat, sheep, and ore) and a desert tile
- Cities, settlements, and roads for 4 players
- A robber
- A number of ports
- A frame to hold everything together
- A largest army trophy
- A longest road trophy
Since we planned to cast everything out of metals, we couldn't differentiate between the players by color. Instead, we decided to give each player a theme:
- Player 1: Space Penguins
- Player 2: Rainbow Unicorns
- Player 3: Fire Dragons
- Player 4: Cloud Pigs
Alayah is a CAD wizard, so most of the cool pieces were designed by her but I did a few which I'll highlight below:
Ore tile
I wanted the Ore Tile to be a mountain with a crater at the top for the number token. Then I added a train track around the mountain that a minecart could run on.
Desinging the Mountain
To get the mountain aesthestic I first made a rough shape in Fusion360 and then exported it to SculptGL - An online sculpting tool. The advantage of SculptGL is that you pull, press, inflate, and smooth the mesh like you would clay unlike Fusion360 which expects more specific dimensioning.
Next up I rescaled the mountain to fit the board, cut out the top for the crater, and cut out a path for the minecart
Then I wanted to add tracks. This was the trickest part. First I used the Pipe tool in Fusion360 to create a pipe around the path. Then I drew skeched the two train tracks and sweeped them along the pipe.
To get the bars between the tracks, I first extruded one from my track sketch. Then I offset all the faces and patterned it on a path around the track. I had to offset the faces as since the path rotates so does the bar and I wanted a portion of it to remain perpendicular to the track.
Finally, to trim the bars to the dimension I swept my original track sketch along the path and intersected it with the patterned bars.
Designing the minecart
I didn't do anything very fancy for the minecart. I just sketched the various parts and extruded them.
For the gems I lofted between different polygons, converted the body to a mesh, and then remeshed and reduced the faces to get a more gem-like shape.
I also reused the cart to have a minecart filled with coal
Bringing it all together
Finally, I combined the mountain and minecart and added some gems to the mountain side: