Making a Child's drawn 3D with a CNC Mill (or Pegasus in the sky)

thingiverse

This thing is really about the process I used to make my daughters artwork pop-into 3D and thus secured my Dad hero position for yet another day. Also I wanted to do something fun with my new ShapeOko2 and this seemed a worthy challenge. Pick a work of art. Something with fat clean lines and no colouring works best. Scan it in and save it as a PNG or Jpeg. Download Inkscape (It's free and opensource) http://inkscape.org/en/ Start Inscape and import your picture. Select your picture go to Path->Trace Bitmap... Change the setting from Brightness cutoff to Edge detection and click OK Select View->Display Mode->Outline This is the time consuming part. Double click on one of the lines and you'll see all the node points. Using "Delete Segment between two non end-point nodes" and "join selected end nodes with new segment" (they are icons on the toolbar, mouse-over should give you the description) You need to fix the drawing so that all the lines in your picture have a nice vector on both sides. You'll probably need a nice double walled border around everything (It doesn't have to be rectangular like mine) Take a look at the svg attached if you're lost as to how your lines should work. Once you're done you'll need to save the svg and import it into cam software. Makecam is free and online http://www.makercam.com/ Import the svg into Makercam and select the boundaries for each segment and do pocket operations on them (I cut to a depth of -0.02" and I used a .0472" EndMill. When you are done generate the tool paths and export the gcode (Maker doesn't generate the most efficient tool paths in the world, but if you aren't making a million copies it shouldn't matter. Paint one side of your material Black and then put it into your Mill and load the gcode and cut. Paint it Be your child's hero. Upload the results so we can see too.