Vector to stl With 123d Design.

123d Design  for those who do not know and have not tried it is a mostly free. 3D designs program from the folks at Autodesk of AutoCAD fame. I say mostly free as a few strings are attached. They want to monitor usage. But this can be disabled in the newer vervins in preferences.  And they want you to sign into their web site and save to the cloud.  And of course there is a premium licence for commercial use. And there are the nuisance banners and prompts to encourage you to sign in get the latest upgrade etc.

All in all IMHO this is a great entry level design program for 3d printing. I have been using this platform to teach 3d printing design at the local makerspace. Earlier this week I had a class of 8 high school aged students that I taught to design their own personalized key fob. It went well with a few expected fobles.

Last week on this forum a gentleman asked for help turning his small business logo  into an stl file. So I decided to give it a go
Seemed like an easy enough  Task but one does not know until one tries.

So fist step search the web for a pertinent readily available logo to experiment with. So pulled down an svg file of the NISSAN vehicle logo. Import as a solid gave strange results  so back up and import as a 2d.  the vectors come in huge and way off the drawing grid so scaling down and moving to the center of the build plate are in order. Also there is a border that IMHO is unneeded and needs to be deleted.  After that it is a fairly straight forward task of selecting the various areas of your object and extruding to desired  but various height.  One completed export as an stl.

Later I decided to try the Mercury Cougar logo  . This was more of a challenge not in 123d but in getting it into an SVG file the downloads included an Ai file and an EPS AI viewer will save as a raster file but not vector. So Load inkscape open attempt to import an EPS , not recognized. Open the Ai file  save as a plain svg then I can open in 123d resize trim  etc.

Found you need to watch for the little pieces that get left behind if one does not pay attention.
Bottom line IMHO this is easy especially if you are used to  123d.
Also found we can use 123d to set different colors for different parts of the design.

My first experience with  inkscape no problems doing what i wanted.

Tin