A lot of nice ideas and shapes here!
As you can tell there is usually more than one way to approach stuff.
With Colin's example, the shape comes from a revolved profile, so that has a kind of bending curvature to the surface of the petal rather than it being more of a straight slab.
The boolean intersection method that I showed earlier will produce a straight slab-ish kind of shape since it is the combination of 2 straight extrusions.
Even though your original sketch showed a straight piece, it seems like the revolve method may be a nice fit for your design instead.
The kind of customization that Nick showed is a cool idea as well! It isn't really too hard to get it, sometimes when you have a solid you can kind of erase a piece of it, and then fill it back in with a custom surface generated by sweeping. Here is a step-by-step for getting that just to help others understand:
Starting with that previous solid:
Delete the top face and the little flat piece at the bottom, leaving just the back and side pieces like this:
Next you can draw in a little curve at the bottom:
And mirror it and then join the 2 pieces together:
Now that joined bottom curve can be used as the profile for a sweep along those other edges. Select that double-bump bottom curve, and run Construct / Sweep. Then select the 2 edges as the sweep rails:
That creates a sweep that looks like this:
Now select that sweep and the other back and side surface piece, and use Edit/Join to glue them together into one piece.
Then there is a little hole at the bottom, if this is planar you can fill it in quickly by selecting the object and running Construct / Planar to fill it in. That Construct / Planar command can be used for 2 types of things - it will create a planar surface from outline curves, or it will also fill in planar holes of surfaces to make a closed solid.
If your bottom part is not planar for some reason (this can happen if some pieces were at different angles or something), the easiest way to make it into a solid is to draw a line that divides it from the side view, and then do a Boolean difference using the line as the cutting object, that kind of cut with a line will make a nice planar hole on something.
One thing that is interesting about this method is it shows how you can take a simple solid, and kind of jazz it up by replacing just a piece of it and then re-joining back into a solid again.
- Michael
