From Blender to Laser cutter !

Dossier réalisé sans l’aide de Google Traduction garanti !

With somes littles bug but still in WIP....

By Léo Marius !

Step 1 : Make an beautiful mesh that you would slice !

You can use all the liberty given by the mesh modeling, with organics, soft shapes, not easy to do in an CAD oriented software.Allow the most extravagent shapes !Here as example, an ugly chair !

Step 2 : Place your futur slices.

Place simple plans where, in your mind, slice are an good option.Put as many slice you whant.

Step 3 : Cut them all !

With the all new fresh Blender Booleans you can now use booleans without to mutch bugs !Before apply to all you plans an solidify modifier that will give you plane an «epaisseur» you chose. (note : In this test I did an identified little mistake that give bad épaisseurs to my planes, it’s why on this sample the «encoches» are not all the good size... Identified mistake, will not appen again)You now got all you plane with nice shapes ! :)

Step 4 : Spot your «encoches».

Now you have your shape, juste need to spot the encoches, I don’t have tool’s yet to be very precise, so with the eye i put the plane in the middle of their «chevauchement».Next again append a lot of booleans opperations for cutting all the needed encoches.

Step 5 : Finalise your shapes.

Once you have all your shape with the encoche put all them flat and make an big sized render (~4000px mini) without anti aliazing.Put an frame with an known size that you could get later in your vector file.

Step 6 : Get your final vector shapes.

With you HD shadow shape, get them on Inkscape (mutch faster an clean than Illustrator for this) and apply an shape vectorisation.You now have an clean and unique vector for eatch shapes ! With the frame arrange the globals scales.Your file are now ready to cut !

Extra infos !

Here is an forum topic with somes detailled problems I got and more technicals information on the process : http://blenderclan.tuxfamily.org/html/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=34402 (French)

For this test i spend less than 2 hours (whitout all the writing part), It was an first try without a lot of informations I use.

If i’m selected for the workshop I will develop a few little scripts for automatise all the booleans and mesh cleaning steps. With thoses scripts I think that for the full process I’ll be able to spent only around 30mn for the full process.

Did I realy need to film myself ? I hate to film myself ! :s

Thanks for reading !Léo Marius. 4D without erasmus travel