PotterDraw is a free app that lets you easily design pottery for 3D printing in full color. It's useful for creating cylindrical shapes such as pots, flasks, vases, bowls, plates, cups, glasses, goblets, or anything similar. You draw the pot's outer wall using a spline, which consists of curved or linear segments. The inner wall is generated automatically. You can also apply effects to the pot's 3D mesh and texture. The effects can be modulated with oscillators, and the modulations can be animated to create shape-morphing videos.
The texture can be a user-specified image file, or it can be synthesized from a color palette. In either case the texture can be customized with various effects that alter the texture mapping via periodic functions. For example you can map the texture in stripes, rings, kaleidoscope-like petals, or in polar coordinates so that a circular image is neatly centered on the bottom of the pot.
Your pot can be exported as a 3D model in various common 3D file formats, including STL, PLY, and Wavefront OBJ. The PLY and OBJ exports both support full color 3D printing, and the PLY export supports both texture mapping and vertex color. You can also export high-resolution 2D images as BMP or PNG files. There's a built-in palette editor, and the spline editor has sophisticated editing features such as grid and snap to grid, rulers, cut and paste, translation, scaling, and rotation.
The app has a modern user interface that includes 2D printing with print preview, full screen mode, a tabbed MDI interface with dockable bars, unlimited undo and redo, and context-sensitive help. A library of basic shapes to use as starting points for your own creations is included.