Simple extruded letters in Sketchup
I wanted to make sure our 8 month old son felt welcome in our new home, and what better way than by putting his name on the door of his room in Makerbotted letters!
I looked on Thingiverse, where there are more than a few sets of letters for blocks and for including in OpenSCAD, but it turns out that it is super-easy to make 3D extruded letters in Sketchup.
- Download and install Google Sketchup, if you haven’t already.
- Make sure you have an STL export plugin installed. I use this one but there are others.
- Start Sketchup
- Go to the Tools menu and select 3D text
- Type your text (it can be a single letter)
- For your dimensions, 0.075m for height will fit nicely in a Makerbot. 0.01 extrusion is good to start with.
- Press the Place button
- Select your letter, and find the STL export option. If you used the plugin I linked to, it’s in the Tools menu.
- Select millimeters as your export unit
- Select STL as your export format
- Open the STL in ReplicatorG
- Use the Move button, and then Center + Put On Platform to get it all lined up
- Print!
| Tagged with | kids, letters, sketchup | One comment |
One Comment so far
Allan Ecker
Gorgeous use of red plastic there!
Blender’s text tool has a few wrinkles in it that need to be dealt with to get solid text, but it comes with automatic bevel, text along a curve, and the ability to use any TTF font. Perhaps it’s worth a tutorial…