There have been many descriptions of taking STL/3MF files to be 2D projected files for laser cutting as SVGs, but I did the reverse. As I have mentioned before I have a niece in the airborne (arctic to be specific) and I love making things for display in her office (such as the howitzer diorama since she is a battery commander in PFAR) so her division’s logo is kind of a shoulder patch and I was trying to find a good printing idea and their logo is unfortunately (or fortunately since I own a 5T Prusa XL) multiple colors. Not that you can’t do it via varying heights and filament switching but those look weird from the side. Luckily there was someone selling a SVG file on Etsy, which looked really nice, it it was optimized for CNC engraving/laser cutting, but here is what I did: (2 parts the tutorial for the converting and then the making the project part)
Tutorial bit
I brought that SVG into fusion 360, luckily since it was for CNC the paths were all closed and no duplicate paths, etc.
In fusion any closed shape can be extruded so each part wa extruded with some variation in height not for colors but for actual 3D aesthetics. For instance the red circle I wanted a fillet on so it had to sit proud of the outline ring below. And I cannot emphasize this enough ], regardless of which cad program you use usually, it has an “appearance” function to apply a color or material cosmetically to a part and without that it would rapidly be unmanageable and several places I hd grabbed the wrong outline and coloring made it glaringly obvious. Also pro tip leave the svg sketch visible so you see where extruded bits aren’t consistent with the drawn logo (I.e. when the idiotic human clicked on the wrong path)
nerdy humblebragging
Now given all the fiddly little bits I extruded everything as a separate object, which meant the 3MF of the logo was like 25 separate parts, luckily prusaslicer asks when it sees a file like this whether it is to be considered simply a pile of separate objects or a single object with multiple parts (that one) which keeps each part selectable as a clickable thing (extremely helpful when assigning an extruder to each thing). You can surface paint of course, but I have way better things in my day. Anyway the logo came out amazing, but huge (I ended up printing it the max Y height on the XL (making it almost 360mm!). But now I have a shoulder patch shaped logo, which basically would need to hang on a wall (boring, and I’d hardly be bragging about that) so that meant a thematically cool base to mount it on, and it needed to be solid enough to survive shipping to Alaska.
So what is Alaska covered in? Well moose and bears, but those would be weird, but I was thinking huge snow covered mountains! Luckily all those synthetic aperture radars satellites have giving us high res scans of the earth, so got a mesh model of the reasonable looking Alaska mountain range (complete with lakes and streams) and colored the lakes and streams within prusaslicer in blue (yes in hindsight the logo should have used the army-blue while the lakes should have used azure-blue instead of the reverse). I cut a slot in the mountains to fit the logo (put a negative-volume cube). But still not over the top enough? Of course not, they are a freakin’ airborne unit, so got a very detailed model of the C-17 she jumps from, and so-scaled it way down (for scale the fuselage is about a pencil width), then 2 quick little half domes with a hole in them to allow heavy fishing line to suspend them as little parachutes (with the jet so tiny I figured at the scale the people are invisible). I also cut an 1.75mm hole in the jet’s under belly and another in the back of the ridge. In the photo the jet (unpainted so a bit thought to spot) is just resting there as I decided if I liked the scale, but when finished will be flying over the ridge on a short length of clear taulman T-lyne which is almost glasslike in clarity and the 100lb fishing line turns invisible (I’ll post that once done). Not sure why the front looks kind of janky, but a quick sand and it looked quite crisp. I also set the logo at a slight slant so it looks like it is stuck in the snow. I’ll reply here with the finished version
Nice project, and your mountains with lakes are awesome! I love doing SVG to 3D print, in F360 it’s so slick…
