Recommendations for Best free vector and 3D design software?

[Jules]

I've got a neighbor who needs to design some fairly easy shapes on the cheap for a business he's trying to get started. Basically he needs slightly wedge shaped 3D text and numbers to use to imprint into a surface to leave a negative impression.

Problem is, he's wanting to do it for a variety of fonts, and I'm not a good enough neighbor to offer to do all of them for him for free. (He's got some big dreams. )

You guys got any recommendations (or words of warning on which software just wouldn't work) for that kind of thing? His design experience is limited to some Photoshop, several years ago. He needs to understand what is involved in something like this before he screws up his current job to make his fortune on something that he thinks looks really easy. (But isn't).

And insta? Just curiosity......What would you charge for a turn-key operation to print an entire alphabet and number set in a single font, (let's say capitals only), cheapest PLA you got, draft quality, colors don't matter, letters about 5 inches tall, half an inch deep, and with about a 1% to 2% wedge shaped decline in depth? So 36 letters and numbers. It'll take (I'm guessing based on the numbers I did for him) about a third a kg of filament at about 20% infill and 3 surface layers. Took about an hour and a half for 2 numbers on average. (So 27-30 print hours - at a rough guess.)

(Might just give him your name as opposed to Shapeways. )

[insta]

I pay commission :v

I charge $3/hr and $0.12/cc for PLA. Sounds like $150-250 range, without having any STLs to work from?

Also, this is again the kind of thing OpenSCAD is made for Feel free to send him my way for all of it, including bulk STL generation.

[Jules]

I'll definitely pass that on! (Much rather have you doing the designing!)

Between you and me though....don't hold your breath. He's a nice guy, but he hasn't got much to work with, and if he finds out it costs anything to get this going, he might back-off the idea.
(But if you can do the designing too, that will make it more attractive.)

Anyway, I can pass on the information on your rates and let him know he has an alternative to Shapeways.

Many thanks!

[insta]

I already have an OpenSCAD script that generates files. Check this generated STL out...

I'm happy to generate the files, and quote them. I don't really negotiate prices , if it's worth it to him then I'll take it seriously. I would charge $10 for that STL when purchased in any quantity. That's .25 layers, 2 perimeters, 2 bottom layers, 3 top layers, 20% infill.

[Jules]

You might need to charge more than that - the script would need to do this:
(even decline towards the center for the outer edges, expansion of the hole on decline going outwards)

0Six.stl

(2.36 MiB) Downloaded 381 times

(Why I don't want to mess with it!)

[insta]

Eh if I crack that once, it's done for all the letters of all the fonts.

[Jules]

Eh if I crack that once, it's done for all the letters of all the fonts.

Problem I run into with that in Rhino is that on a thin lettered serif font (aka: Times New Roman, what he wants to use ), the thin edges tend to get creamed and cause all kinds of weird twisting at the thin spots when you try to use the lofting function. (You can see it on that one I posted.)

And that's the good news. Trying to use the straight tapered extrusion leaves a slew of garbage from intersecting faces on the curves.

So if you can solve that one......I'll pay to see it!

(And he wants to do script fonts as well....sigh.)

[jsc]

You can do this in (something like) Fusion 360 in at least two ways:

Sketch, offset plane, second sketch, project the first sketch, inset or outset curves, loft.

or

Sketch, extrude, draft

I've played around a little bit in OpenSCAD and can't figure out how to do it there. You can get halfway with the first method using text() and offset(), but there is no way to loft. I thought maybe you could do it using linear_extrude(scale=x) but that doesn't do the right thing for this.

The lack of lofting really bites.

Oh, here's a method that almost works, except it rounds off the base and is insanely computationally intensive:

Code: Select all

module t() {
  scale([5, 5, 1]) text("A");
}

module cone() {
  rotate_extrude($fn=50) polygon([[0, 0], [1, 0], [0, 1]]);
}

minkowski() {
  linear_extrude(1) t();
  scale([2, 2, 10]) cone();
}

[Tim]

OpenSCAD snippet:

Code: Select all

    linear_extrude(height=2)
    text("Harry", size=18,
                valign="center", halign="center");

Only fairly recent versions of OpenSCAD support the "text" function, but it's so very nice, and works with many fonts.translate([5, 0, 0])
The problem is the same as you already stated. . . it doesn't angle the letters. You can do this:

Code: Select all

    linear_extrude(height=2, scale=1.1)
    text("Harry", size=18,
                valign="center", halign="center");

But that angles the entire word proportionally, so that the letters on the ends are more angled than the letters in the center.
I can only offer this:

Code: Select all

translate([5, 0, 0])
  linear_extrude(height=2, scale=1.1)
    text("H", size=18, valign="center", halign="center");
translate([20, 0, 0])
  linear_extrude(height=2, scale=1.1)
    text("a", size=18, valign="center", halign="center");
translate([32, 0, 0])
  linear_extrude(height=2, scale=1.1)
    text("r", size=18, valign="center", halign="center");
translate([40, 0, 0])
  linear_extrude(height=2, scale=1.1)
    text("r", size=18, valign="center", halign="center");
translate([51, 0, 0])
  linear_extrude(height=2, scale=1.1)
    text("y", size=18, valign="center", halign="center");

which does almost exactly what you want, but it requires manually spacing the letters out.

It's an interesting challenge and I'll keep thinking about it. There may be a way to do it properly.

[Jules]

I figure I'm probably going to have to introduce smaller, more numerous offsets and take it up (or down) gradually with the lofting, but if it's this much of a pain with what is essentially a straight font with a couple of slightly curved flourishes, I can't imagine the nightmare that a decorative script font would be.

But I'm gonna watch what you guys come up with, with great interest.......

(You guys are freaking genii!)