Dice shrine

I build some dice holders to improve my DnD game. I’d been making some bad rolls so I built these devices to give my D20s positive or negative feedback.

  • Dice shrine (right) which charges up good luck.
    Where there is the carrot there must be the stick – if the dice performs poorly it goes in jail (left).
  • Models without the D20
  • You can see the contact pads for the die. It fits in snugly and self-aligns.

The dice shrine

I did the modeling in Fusion 360. The D20 was done using patched sketches. The holder was done with the sub-d sculpting enviornment and lofting.

I wanted to do most of the work in the sub-d environment, but I wanted to utilize both circular and mirror symmetry as much as possible. These were hard to combine, but I think I found a way to do it that wasn’t so painful.

I started by modeling a D20.

Started with a 3d sketch. The main approach was that all lines are equal length.
Then I just patched each triangle.

The main feature

The first sculpted form, which is the main feature of the part. The center form under the D20 uses circular symmetry, and the outer two forms both use mirror symmetry. This symmetry arrangement is what drives the whole approach.

Contact pads

Making the contact pad. This will be what holds the D20. For tolerance and aesthetics I just guessed and it worked fine the first time.

Connecting to the D20

These first lofts connect the the three surface bodies to the contact pads.
A circle pattern of everything so far makes it start to take shape.
More lofts to connect bits which were on opposite sides before the circular mirror.
Mirror those new lofts.
Circular patterning the new lofts and stitching the result yields the completed part.

I think it worked pretty well in that I could edit most of the sculpture in the one main feature, while also having the advantage of mirror and circular symmetry in that feature. When I iterated on the design I would edit that feature, and it would look like this:

The view when iterating on the design. It was convenient to only have to edit one feature but also be able to see a wireframe of the fully mirrored piece. The wireframe shadow doesn’t update live but it was still extremely useful to have.
The view when iterating on the design

This approach took a while to find. I would be curious to hear different approaches to this problem.

The dice jail

This was almost a pure sculpt in the sub-d environment.

It uses 6-way circular symmetry. The lines of symmetry (green) were out of control at the end because there were so many connections between different instances.
The underlying mesh driving the sub-d.
The only non-sculpted feature was a cut I made at the end. This was to help it adhere to the print bed and also to sit more solidly on my desk.

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