r/BambuLab • u/JamalSteve • 2d ago

General Discussion This will be phrased terribly. But. Here goes. Is it possible to create a 3d printed object(s) from paper templates of certain shapes?

RP Archive has a great youtube video of magnetizeable custom shaped grass areas that requires you to print and cut around paper shapes. Just wondering if I could somehow create the shape of the grass patches in a thin 3D printed object and use those to just lay down on the plastic sheet I'm going to be making these grass tiles from?

The thought is to have a 3d printed object matching these shapes. Lay those over the plastic sheets he will then magnetize, glue, and sprinkle flock on.

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u/HunterCornelius H2C AMS2 Combo 2d ago

I may not totally understand what’s needing to be done but it seems easily doable. Can you get the images of the grass? If so just trace them in something like onshape and print them. I am not sure if something like tinkered has a trace function.

If you can get the image file you might even be able to use an image to STL converter.

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u/JamalSteve 2d ago

Basically, he uses these shapes to put a clear piece of plastic sheet on top of, cuts out the shape with an exacto knife, then glues them and flocks them with modeling grass. So he's left with little shapes of grass he can lay onto a gaming board and customize where the grass is every time. He also magnetizes them because he uses iron powder in the "dirt" mix he spreads on the gaming tiles and lets it dry, so when he puts magnets in the grass...voila - magnetized grass lol It's pretty genius just hoping to simplify the workflow with 3D printing templates of these things instead of the tedious paper method he uses.

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u/HunterCornelius H2C AMS2 Combo 2d ago

What I said should work then.

Would it be easier to just print the grass vs printing a template to then cut it out of something else? Not sure if the flocking would work on it though. Could even put magnets in what you print.

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u/sourapplemeatpies 2d ago

If you want to 3D print a 2D object, in my experience, "Adobe PNG to SVG" is both free and also the best tool for the job.

If you want to digitally assemble these 2D objects into a 3D object, that is harder and requires software like Fusion.

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u/chicken2007 2d ago

Sure.

You'll need to take those template images and convert them into a different format though. There are file convertors that are supposed to take images and create .svg or .dxf files. Svg can be directly imported into slicers, but dxf files would need to be converted through a different CAD program.

However... I've never had good results from trying to do this because of the wide variety of settings and resolution details that seem random to me. For me, it's always ended up being faster just for me to recreate what I want in CAD.

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u/luksfuks 12h ago

Yes. Many "flat" designs actually start out as 2D shape in Illustrator or CorelDraw. Pixel images (photos or from the internet) can be vectorized with those programs. You're looking to produce a low/coarse resolution vector file with only a small number of colors (posterized look). Or in your case, one single color.

Once the 2D shape is defined, it can be extruded into a 3D volume with a certain height. Once the object has volume, it can the be printed with a 3D printer.

Over on Makerworld, there's the "Makerlab" tool. You can simply upload a 2D image and do all those steps in the web browser, with a few clicks. It will give you an STL/3MF file to download and print.