I’ve been experimenting with dice etching and ended up designing a parametric driven design dice tray holder in Fusion 360. I think this ended up more interesting than the dice themselves.
It creates a tray that replaces the steel grate tray and keeps the dice at the perfect height for what i was trying to achieve.
360 allows me to make the design highly configurable. I can define dice size, width and depth of the tray and the rest gets auto-calculated.
My pleasure… as a note I use the “Save DXF For Laser Cutting” plugin to take the faces and generate svg’s. This allows me to adjust for kerf depending on material. Highly recommend it if you’re not using it already.
Thanks for this. I actually created a 1 x 5 dice holder for exactly the same reason. I found that the 3 (middle and the adjacents) were precise in engraving acrylic dice (16mm), there was a drift from center for dice in the first and fifth position. I’d be interested to hear if you experience the same.
I’ve found that if I do individual drops into the project i get drift but if i create a master svg with all he components with the center directly under center camera alignment has been good for me. At least out to a 5 x 8 array that I played with.
You’ll want to leave it in F360 until you have defined the parameters for the shape and size of the dice…then you export the sketches as DXF files, and those can be opened in Inkscape or Illustrator to convert into an SVG file.
(Yes, it’s a silly amount of conversions, but it doesn’t really take that long once you get used to the workflow. Or there are plugins for F360 that export SVGs directly. Shaper has one that does that - you’ll still want to combine the faces into one file though to save time, so they still tend to wind up being combined in something like Illustrator.)
If you have a specific set of parameters you’d like I can set the model to them and export SVGs. I still highly recommend investing the time into Fusion360. For me that design step is the real pleasure of using the Glowforge.
Thanks Jules and Peter! I mainly work in Corel Draw, and just save as SVG’s in Inkscape, but I’ll check Fusion 360 out. For now, I’ll try opening it in Inkscape like @Jules mentioned.
thanks for this.
I have hit a point with a design where custom die are needed. This post is so helpful first in knowing that it is is possible and the know how you shared.
