Custom Patterned Flower Pot

In the spirit of creating something with patterns, I thought it would be a cool and useful idea to create a printable flower pot that will help anyone, from aspiring planter to seasoned veteran, hold their favorite foliage in style. Below is a comprehensive yet simple to follow, step by step guide on how I, and how YOU, can make a really cool patterned flower pot.

To design the pot, you will need a Computer and Fusion 360. These two tools will provide you everything you need to design the flower pot of your dreams.

If you want to take it a step further and actually print out your flower pot (Which I didn't choose to do), you will also need access to some sort of 3D Printer

To start crafting this flower pot, we need to use the right tool for the job. Because we are creating a very abstract and unique flower pot, we need something that will allow us to get crafty. Simply sketching and extruding our desired shape will take far too long and be far too complicated. Luckily for us, Fusion 360 has the perfect thing for us, The "Create Form" tab.

What this aspect of software will allow is to do is sculpt and move around shapes in ways really hard otherwise. To access this, go to the create tab in the top left and look for the purple box and click on it. You will then be brought to a new area of selection, and from there click the drop down word "create" and look for the cylinder option (As it most closely resembles the shape we want to create.

Once you have selected the cylinder option, it is time to make the frame of the pot. After clicking the option, you will see 3 yellow planes appear on the workspace, and you will click the one on the bottom floor, the "X-Y Plane". From there you will see what looks almost like a target of sorts in the middle of the intersecting red and green lines. Click on that to tell Fusion that that is where the center of your build will be.

Now that we have our position of the pot, we need the diameter of the pot. I chose to make it 3 inches (Which is equivalent to 76.2 mm). *Bonus tip, you can just type “___ in” to make your dimensions in inches instead of converting to mm every time* Now that you have your diameter, you will also be asked to input your height, which I also made 3 inches.

Last step here is to see how many faces you'd like and if you want symmetry. The amount of faces basically sys how complex the pot is, so feel free to just follow with I have (Or don't, its your choice)! The big takeaway here though is to select the symmetry menu and make sure to click "Circular", which will help you build the pot up more later on.

Going on further with the symmetry portion, double click on one of the resulting green lines you see after confirming "Circular Symmetry". You will see all the lines turn yellow, confirming symmetry. With one of the lines selected, right click and look for "Crease", which will create more jagged outside to the pot perfect for what we will do in a bit.

We are ready to almost begin sculpting. Hold shift and click on every in a row downwards, as seen in the photo above. Once you have all selected, right click again and this time look for where it says "Edit Form". This will take you to a new workspace with new options, which I will explain in the next step

From here we will split up the steps into 3 main ones, so follow along accordingly

1. Look for the cube in the top right corner and find the side of it which says "Top". Click on it to be brought to a top-down view of the whole project. From there, hold down the "Alt" key (Or "Option" if you are working on Mac) to initiate an extrusion, which extends the face of a shape or sketch. With your key held, click and drag the middle square-like shape downwards just a little to create depth to the shape of your entire pot. You can see the first image for reference.

1. Next up go to a side view of the pot again. From here, shift and click a whole column of the inside of one of the gaps created by the extrusion, but make sure it's only one side of the gap. From there, right click and select edit form again. Once you're here, go back to a top view and drag the square again to the left WITHOUT HOLDING ALT/OPTION. You should see the whole shape start to move. Move and play around with the pot until you notice triangles of sorts start to form on the outside, and stop when you see the point of the triangle is right about in the middle of the line.

1. Lastly you will repeat what you just did except going the other way. Shift and select the the other side of the gap, which should be a lot larger now, and hit edit form once more. The same steps apply now, click and drag the square the other way until you see what you deem to be a pretty nice triangle (And don't worry it doesn't have to be perfect). With these steps done, you have shaped the outside of the pot!

Now that we have the shape of the pot, we have to mold it to our liking. Choose a side view of the pot and click anywhere to the left of the pot while staying in the middle, do not drag, and pull across the pot to highlight and select the middle line of the pot. If you did it right it should like to the first photo. If it's right, go ahead and right click and select our friend edit form again. This time, however, we are going to scale instead of move. To do this, click and hold the little circle you see in the middle and pull outward to create a bulge from the middle out. Don't make the bulge too large, and it you'd like to follow mine you could type 1.183 in the menu that appears to input the same dimension.

When you are done with that, hold shift and highlight both the top and bottom lines this time, and then do edit form once more. We are going to use scale again, only this time inwards instead of outwards, or a value of 0.922 like I did. At this point the pot will look a little wonky so we are going to fix the silhouette of it.

Click the first row, one section up and one section down from the middle and edit its form. Scale outwards until you see a nice roundness start to form in the pot. There is no specific any one value for any of these steps, just play around until you think it looks good. From there, tweak any of the scaling we just did, and go ahead and play around with the middle row, top/bottom, or any row until you think it looks superb.

Lastly, highlight the whole pot and edit its form one last time. Look just above the square to see a thin horizontal line. Click and drag that up to scale the pot vertically, and watch how it goes from more "pumpkin" to more pot!

The most important step is upon us, creating the actual pattern outside the pot. This will be done through a system of twisting, helping the spiral pattern take shape.

We are going to start by highlighting every single row except for the bottom one, as seen by the first photo. Once you have this done, right click and access edit form once more. This time when you are brought to the workspace, rotate your view plane until you see a new circle appear (It’s very hard to explain, but look at the second photo and try to spot the blue circle I have clicked, that’s the one you want). Once you’ve found it, click and drag it a certain distance depending on how many rows of face you have. In my case, I had 6 rows, so I didn’t rotate too much, only 30 degrees. Once you have done this, you will rinse and repeat a process of selecting one less row as you did before. Since we started leaving 1 row unhighlighted, the next time you will leave 2, and then 3, and then so on and so forth. The crucial thing to remember here, however, is that every time you move on to the next row to rotate 5 degrees less, so a more gradual curve will form and fit the shape of the pot much better as a result. In my case, the first rotation was 30 degrees, so the next one was 25. I repeated this process until I finished every single row.

Just make sure that when you are done with all the rows to finish up by also rotating the top line as well (Look at the 5th picture for reference). The same idea about rotating by 5 degrees less as before still applies.

Because we want the pot to have some kind of thickness to the walls and such, we are going to have to fill in the pot with material. Right now the pot is hollow, and the following steps are how to change that.

1. You are going to need to offset a plane to tell Fusion between what 2 planes you want to fill. You already should have a bottom plane because of the fact you started your sketch on the XY Plane, so now you just need the top one. To make one, click the dropdown menu on the “Construct” tab, and click on the first option that says offset plane. You will want to offset the XY plane as that will sort of “sandwich” the pot, so move your view around until you can select that option (The bottom of the 2 orange squares you see). Then once you have selected the right plane, offset it up the height of your pot, which will leave you with a plane both perfectly on the bottom and the top of the pot.

1. Then when you have your two plane, go back to the “Create” tab and click the little arrow on it to access the dropdown. Go to the bottom of the menu and look for Boundary Fill. A new menu will be pulled up now, asking you to “Select Tools”. For this, you will click on the pot itself, and both planes, meaning you have selected 3 things. Once that is done, click the “Select Cells” button, and look for the little tiny square that appears inside of the pot, and go ahead and select that. You should see a little check mark inside the square if you chose the right one. If everything checks out, go ahead and hit Ok and watch as within a second or two (Or a bit more depending on your computer) your entire pot with be solid.

We will be adding some thickness to the pot as we hollow it out in just a bit, so an optional step to make the process a bit easier is to create a specific parameter for the thickness of the pot in our creations from here on out.

1. Hit the dropdown “Modify” tab, and look for the “Change Parameters” button all the way at the bottom”
2. You will enter a new table of options, and here look for the “User Parameters” option, and hit the plus sign to add on, which we will customize.
3. You can name the parameter anything you’d like, so make it something simple and related to its task, such as just “thickness” which is what I did. Select whatever unit you think is best to work with, and then add the value of said thickness in the “Expression” portion. I used 0.06 inches, but you can change this depending on personal preference.

Now whenever you want to make a change or sketch with a uniform value, you can simply type this instead of trying to remember every value you’ve worked with, and potentially mess something up.

With some volume to my pot, the last step was to creat the divot to hold the plants ands soil. To do this, you will first have to start a new sketch on the top surface of the pot. Once here, offset the shape of the top the desired thickness you like, meaning this would be a perfect time to use the custom parameter you made before (If you actually made one). To get this profile, you can use the project command by simply typing “P”, and once in the menu shift-clicking every edge you see on the top of the profile. Once you’ve confirmed this projection, you can double click on it to select and use the offset tool, which is the curved icon next to the scissors, and offset inwards your “thickness” distance.

Now that you have that step done, extrude that new shape (The smaller profile) by right clicking on it and looking for the extrude command. For the distance of this extrusion, do 2 * thickness, which will be just enough to get a nice shape to the inside. The key part of this step is to change the “Operation” on the bottom to “Cut”, which will make a hole in top of the pot.

Lastly we will create the tunnel for the soil and plants to go. To do this, first flip your pot upside down on the bottom and start a new sketch on said bottom. Select the circle tool and make a circle in the middle of your pot a certain diameter, n my case which was 0.3 inches (Very Small). This will act as the drainage hole when all is said and done. From there, click the “Construct” dropdown and look for “Axis Perpendicular to Face at Point”. From there it will ask you to select a face and point, so go ahead and pick the center of our new circle for the point and the profile itself for the face. You will see a line go across the pot which we will use as an axis for what we are about to do.

Click the dropdown once more and look for the “Plane at an Angle option”. Your angle will be the line you just made, so click on it to see a new plane cutting the pot down the middle. On it, create a new sketch. Once there, go to a side view and look for the intersection point between the bottom of the pot and the green axis we made. From that point, move up your “thickness” value, and from there make a horizontal line encompassing the whole pots length. In addition, make a line that goes up the center of the pot all the way until you pass the pot. If confused, look at the second image. Lastly, use the spline line command next to the circle to incrementally create a half-profile of the pot. It is hard to explain, so again, look at the second image for reference. Your final product should look like that, with the curve of the profile not touching the edge of the pot walls. If so, you are ready to revolve it.

Finish the sketch and look for the revolve tool, and click on your new shape. Then, choose your axis as the one we made before, and change the operation to “Cut” once more. If all went to plan, you should have a perfect hole in the middle of your pot, just like the first photo, and a complete pot!!

Your final product should be a beautiful pot with quite a unique pattern on it. If you’d like to render it like I did here, feel free to slap a plastic texture on it and import some fire flowers to put inside the pot (The flowers were not mine, they were a free download from GrabCad). If you actually want to put your pot to the test, then printing it out and using may be up your alley, just make sure to use a material that won’t harm your plants!

I appreciate everyone who took the time to read and follow along with my Instructable today. I’d also like to extend a sincere thanks to the Instructables team for giving me a medium to create something for all those here right now. If I inspired you to create something, whether it be this pot or not, then please follow the spirit of the platform and make one yourself, as the more we create, the more we connect. All in all, this was a fun challenge that culminated in something really cool, and I think that’s the best outcome we could have had here :)