3D Letters

[giggalo]

Hello Shopbotters I have not been in the fourm for awhile been to busy with making letters for Lowe's.

I had a buddy send me a 3d letter program that all you have to do is type what you want and save as a dxf and it will produce it 3d and your cutting 3d letters, you can use any font and picture or pictures that are in True Type and it will produce it in 3d.

I tried it and it seems to work fine, I did some letters and pictures, the pictures I converted to fonts and it does a good job.

I am now doing Crown Molding for a company that has a hard time making them fit right, after doing a sample they were sold, it seems that there is a big demand for this and if you know how to do layers you can make some big bucks.

Another thing I am now doing is Fretwork Patterns, Jay Ekins does this for a living and when he asked me if i could do it on a shopbot? well I set my table up for cut outs and gave it a try, I scaned a pattern converted it to vector, sized it in turbocad, put on my 1/16 bit and cut the pattern in 17 min. Jay said he was sold and now has me do all his work for him, just another thing you can do with the ole shopbot.

If any of you would like the the ed letter program drop me a email and I will send you copy, It is a freeware.

Ron

[giggalo]

I played with the 3d program today and it seems to work fine with Turbocad but there seems to be some tricks to this program.

When you type in text in the program and do not make any changes it turbocad it works fine? but if you do make changes besides the Z depth it looks to run in diffrent directions? but if you do all the changes in the program before you save it as a dxf and only change the Z depth it works fine, I am not sure if all cad program will work with this program but if you are able to view 3d it might work.

I sent the maker of this program a email to see if it is ok with him if I can add and change some features on it.

I made a little script that seems to work great with it but I will need to make some changes to his program.

1.What I did is added a X Y Z tool bar so you can size the letters and the depth before saving as a dxf.

2. I added the script that converts bmp to sbp files with a edit command so the SC, can be added to any 3d file.

3.Added an emport for other 2d and 3d files.

Another thing I tried is I took a picture of a No Smoking Sign and turned it into a True Type Font and the program converted it to 3d so now there is no 3d picture that can't be done in minutes.

Please do not ask for these scripts I will need to get written permission from him before I do this to his program.

But if any shopbotter thinks other things might come in handy drop me a note.

Ron

[jason mcbride]

Hello Mr.Varela I am trying to do the same thing you are we are scanning a picture into corel can you tell us how to scan it into vector so our shopbot will cut the design can you send us the instructions on how you do this we would be thankful for any help you could provide

[rgengrave@aol.com]

Jason the post above is a very old post and there are new and better ways of scaning

If you are trying to take a picture from a scan you will need to convert it to a vector format then open or inport it into the program Vector.

Corel Trace works on somethings but does not work all that well, IMO.

There are program out there like Wintopo that are FREE, it does a better job then Corel but you will still need to do some editing.

I do not use the program Vector so I can not help you much there, now if you want to be able to do it with a $30.00 program let me know and I will pull some movies off my server and send them to you, geting a scaned image to a ready to cut file is easy if you use the right program for the job.

Just drop me an email so I can reply and attach the movies.
Ron V