I am trying to make Asian style brass plate drawer corners and pull back plate for furniture that I am building. I want to use a CNC to cut the brass out and engrave the butterfly design on the surface. I have a butterfly SVG that I imported into SketchUp and it works great for the drawer pull back plate.
I need to transform/distort the butterfly SVG from a rectangular to a triangle for the corner plates. The butterfly SVG needs to remain a vector style graphic so that a CNC can cut and engrave it. Any suggestions?
How are you expecting to fit the butterfly on those corner pieces? Are you just wanting to project the butterfly across the three faces? Are you planning to etch the butterfly onto the metal and then fold it to make the corner piece?
I don’t use SketchUp very often and still use 2017.
I drew those corners on the bottom drawer similar to an antique Korean piece but I realized it doesn’t fit with the butterfly style. My plan is to create a new corner plate that follows the wings of the butterfly and fits square in the corner.
Do you have the svg imported into SketchUp as vector linework? If so, you should be able to intersect that line work with a face and erase what you don’t need to leave the outline.
If you have the butterfly as an image in SketchUp you could trace it with the various drawing tools or you could look at using an extension like Pic2Shape from Sketchucation to do the tracing for you.
It will be one flat brass piece per corner. Similar to the picture above but with a butterfly etching on it.
Do you have the svg imported into SketchUp as vector linework?
I imported the SVG into SketchUp which is the center butterfly in the SketchUp screenshot above.
The challenge for me is how do I distort the butterfly SVG vector image into a triangle shape to fit the corner plate without having to redraw or trace all the lines.
So the plate is only on the front and not wrapping around like typical corner reinforcements?
If you have the butterfly inserted as actual edges you might be able to use Box Tapering or other tools in FredoScale (again from Sketchucation) or maybe you can set up the butterfly outline at the appropriate angle to the face that represents the brass and extrude those edges through the plate and then intersect them. You just need to find a suitable angle.
Dave already gave you the solution, use Fredo > Box Tapering. If you didn’t understand what he said, you should have said it or searched YouTube for tutorials with those keywords.
Due to our busy schedule, I won’t have time to try this out until this weekend.
How did you create the brass plate that is slightly larger than the butterfly?
