Makerbot Design and Document Challenge #1: 3D Logo
Jerry Isdale
design tools, and finding only tidbits of help scattered around the
net, I am starting what hopefully becomes a series of challenges to
the Makerbot community.
The core idea is: Create an object printable on Makerbot, AND
document the design process so that others can recreate it and/or
variants.
The key is documenting the design process. Use any tools you want
(commercial or free). Post the completed design to Thingiverse, AND
post documentation on how you made it to the Makerbot wiki (or
instructables, or your own site) and post links back to the group (and
the Makerbot Wikii)
The first challenge is to create a 3D Logo object.
The EpicFu (http://www.epicfu.com) logo can provide a common base, and
they have kindly given permission to use it for this purpose. You can
pick up the logo by visiting their web site, or grab the 2d B&W image
from http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1973
The wiki page to collect links to the solution descriptions is at
http://wiki.makerbot.com/making-a-3d-logo
I already made one attempt at the design, uploading the STL, Blender
and source image files to the Thingiverse page (see above). My process
documentation is at http://wiki.makerbot.com/isdale-making-3d-logo-blender.
I was able to get a partial print out of it before my bot had feed
problems. I discovered the object is a bit too small and the lettering
is cramped. Some other LA Makerbot folks tried to slice and build
using these files and had problems. Miles rebuilt the design using
OpenSCAD, and Bo was able to get the larger version to print (sorta),
using his hot water heated platform hack. (he soaks his mod'd platform
in hot water before printing). It is a public wiki page and if you
think you can improve that page or design process, please edit it!
So there's one data point - with issues. Can you do better? Not just
in making the logo and posting stl, but doing a writeup on How You
Made It. Are you willing to help the community?
I throw down my power glove and challenge you!
Jerry
Thomas Charron
> The core idea is: Create an object printable on Makerbot, AND
> document the design process so that others can recreate it and/or
> variants.
Is, "Use this perl script I wrote" and acceptable answer? :-D
--
-- Thomas
Ethan Dicks
That works for me, but I'm a Perl Hacker.
-ethan
Jerry Isdale
I would be impressed and interested to see it. I would Expect the code
to be well written and commented, not the usual write only perl style.
Remember the idea is to educate others and share.
Thomas Charron
> If you can make a printable object from an image file using perl only
> I would be impressed and interested to see it. I would Expect the code
> to be well written and commented, not the usual write only perl style.
> Remember the idea is to educate others and share.
Soooo, if it had a gimp plugin that created a height map which was
then converted into GCode.. :-D
In that way, you could use whatever fonts, etc that the gimp
supported, and fill the sections with greyscale for hight. Letters
end up being black, aka, all the way up, white = nothing there. Then
you could do some pretty cool processing using gimp.
--
-- Thomas
Bo Lorentzen
height in mm ?
Save as high Rez gif for processing.
Bo
Sent from my iPhone
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "MakerBot Operators" group.
> To post to this group, send email to make...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to makerbot+u...@googlegroups.com
> .
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/makerbot?hl=en
> .
>
Thomas Charron
> How about converting gray scale to height - Fill name contains max
> height in mm ?
>
> Save as high Rez gif for processing.
That's what a height map is. :-D
--
-- Thomas
Jerry Isdale
gcode from height map?
How do you control the x/y size in GIMP vs z height?
It sounds interesting and I could see other application like 3d maps
from USGS Digital Elevation Maps (DEM).
I havent heard of such a tool before but if you can do it, write it
up!
Cathal Garvey
Toward the point of this thread, I offer this dirty tutorial for OpenSCAD I wrote a while back. Open it in OpenSCAD, and start reading and following instructions to get a rundown of the system and a head-start in coding with it.
--
letters.cunningprojects.com
twitter.com/onetruecathal
twitter.com/labsfromfabs
Devlin
http://hackaday.com/2010/01/12/how-to-make-a-printable-ces-badge/
These were lapel pins of the Hack a Day logo. It involves taking
a .dxf of your logo and breaking it into different parts (in QCad) and
bringing them back together in various heights and shapes in OpenSCAD.
It works pretty well for monochromatic logos. Keep in mind that the
logo is changing mediums and some logos may not turn out all that
great in 3D (like ones with optical illusions or fine lines).
-Devlin
Dave M.
situation. Anyone can download it, load an image, and then run it
through his filter.
I imagine it would:
1. scale to fit Cupcake / RepRap build surface size, preserving
aspect ratio
2. threshold to perhaps remove background effects around the logo
3. convert from color to grayscale
Tony Buser
object from an image, but I did come up with a way to define bitmaps
(and bitmap fonts) in OpenSCAD. Using this, it should be possible to
extend it to build a height map from a grayscale image. You can find
more info on my blog post:
Bo Lorentzen
http://tonybuser.com/3d-text-and-openscad-bitmaps
We have been digging these already.... two of the girls in design here is totally into "fonts" and I told them it was a way to print type's for typesetting old-style. they want to know how to print any font.
Bo
TeamTeamUSA
school!
Go!
=ml=
Jerry Isdale
Thats a cool one Tony! I put a link to it in the Makerbot wiki. I
like the gray scale idea. I'll look into the code a bit 'cause this
is similar to my next personal challenge - converting USGS DEM files
to printed objects.
Bo Lorentzen
Printing USGS files seems VERY cool. so are you going to slice them in squares..?
Bo
Jordan Miller
Maybe a blender python script would be useful here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD-6E1PeM6g
jordan
Ethan Dicks
> That's really cool Tony! Hmm... fonts are already vector format, so why not
> use the vector info in the font directly instead of rasterizing to png then
> going back to vector dxf?
Because the present version of OpenSCAD supports a limited variety of
DXF vector entities, the reason for this in the first place. If it
supported POLYLINE (and a few others), it would be "easy" to have any
DXF creator handle the font rendering and leave the 3D extrusion to
OpenSCAD.
Tony's hack takes an existing bitmapped font (with double-width lines
to avoid diagonal pixel issues) and "draws" it using supported
methods.
At some point, OpenSCAD will probably be able to handle vectorized
fonts - that day is not today. Until then, we have _some_ way to do
it, which is a big step forward.
-ethan
Jordan Miller
jordan
Tony Buser
I just added height map support to it. You can see an example here:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2070 Now all you'd need to do is
export your terrain data to an array and pass it onto that script like
this :)
/Applications/OpenSCAD.app/Contents/MacOS/OpenSCAD -m make -D
bitmap=[2,2,2,0,1,3,2,2,2] -D row_size=3 -s height_map.stl
height_map.scad