Have recently assembled a K8400 3D printer and getting to grips with SketchUp. I’m interested in finding way to make easily pull or extrude text to a point in the middle of the text as though making a pyramid with the initial text footprint, hope that make sense.
This is so that the final 3d print or stamp can be more easily pushed semi soft surface. Not sure if SketchUp is the best software option for what I’m doing but thought I would ask as it was the first software I have tried.
Any ideas or help is greatly appreciated. Cheers, Harry
You could place the text, explode it, pull the top surface up to the height you want for the pyramid, look at it from the side, select the top edges with a click-drag from left to right, select the Scale tool, and scale the selected faces down to a point.
You may need to use a modifier key to get the scaled top layer to scale around the center of the text.
I’m not certain that the pyramid concept is what you really want. Depending on the shape of the letter, that can produce overhanging surfaces and other issues. For example, this is a “T” on which I scaled down the top around its center point.
You probably want to create a centerline in the top of the letter and taper the sides smoothly toward that line. That’s a more complicated task than the scaling @colin suggested.
That is true, but if you scale and then type .001, it ends up being pretty small, smaller than a 3D print of the letter would show.
It also could be neat to scale to a bit bigger than that anyway, that way the top of the pyramid still resembles a tiny version of the letter. You wouldn’t need to turn it over to confirm what letter it was.
Depending on the height of the pyramid, the 3D print should be able to cope with the overhang. And you can’t avoid the overhang in all cases, ⃞ for example would overhang in four directions.
I don’t think the issue is with the 3D print, it is with the usefulness of the printed shape for what the OP intended: pressing into a soft surface like a stamp. The overhangs will push material out of the way and it has no means to flow back in to fill the gap as you press deeper. Or, if it does, you can’t pull the stamp back out!
Can’t you just use the technique shown, using the Round Corner plugin and some native tool manipulation ?
How is your ‘e’ or ‘s’ different from say the illustrated ‘O’ or ‘E’ ?
Clearly the font needs to be a simple type to allow sensible chamfering of the letters’ edges, but after that the same principles apply, just as @Cotty admirably illustrated in his animation.
