Occasional Observations of Traveling Technology Coach

A colleague showed me this amazing lesson to make safari-themed trinkets using Tinkercad.com and a 3D printer.

1) Find a free jpg image of an animal from a safari-themed clip art website. (Obviously any jpg will do, it just so happens that the theme for their school’s prom is “safari.”) I choose a tree from clipart-library.com.

2) Use online-convert.com to change the image file into a .svg file.

3) Log into Tinkercad.com and make a new 3D design

4) Import the .svg image and keep it under 1000 mm (I made mine about 120 mm per side).

5) Make a duplicate of the design, and change the fill mode of the duplicate to outer line.

6) Reduce the height of the initial import to a smaller number (I reduced it to 1 mm high).

The design should now appear as a shape with a higher border around it. Group both into one shape.

FYI: The silhouette mode also works, when it is available (depending on the imported shape).

7) Add a Basic Shape ring to the top of the design. . Position it and make sure that the height of the ring is the same height as the trinket.

8) Align the center of the ring with the trinket.

Before aligning

After aligning

9) Group everything and export as an .stl file

10) Open in slicing software (I use Makerbot Print)

AND VOILA