I was blown away with some laser cut art work I saw the other day and had to try it myself. I don’t have a laser cutter but I can mock up the designs in 3D.
The simplest work was expanding and contracting circles arranged radially with lines around the edge. The trickiest part where some curved points in the outer group of circles.
OpenSCAD was use to do the modelling. Less well known than its 3D abilities, OpenSCAD has 2D shapes, 2D binary operations, and once the model is compiled can export to dfx, or svg files.
The circles and lines are the normal scad primitives, but the pointy curves are polygons generated from Bezier curves.
public static Vector2 CalculateBezierPoint(double t, Vector2 p0, Vector2 p1, Vector2 p2, Vector2 p3)
{
double u = 1 - t;
double tt = t * t;
double uu = u * u;
double uuu = uu * u;
double ttt = tt * t;
Vector2 p = uuu * p0; //first term
p += 3 * uu * t * p1; //second term
p += 3 * u * tt * p2; //third term
p += ttt * p3; //fourth term
return p;
}
The Chinese one I have can import either dxf or Adobe AI files. The job is then setup in the laser software (cut speeds, power, etc) and finally sent to the laser.
I saw a couple of MHV projects relating to CNC routers and the like. A 400nm laser out of an X-box in conjunction with a CNC X-Y stage might provide for an interesting and relatively low cost experimental setup for laser etching.
I recently had an attempt at making this and it came out amazingly. Thank you for the files. However, I decided to try and see if I could design this in Illustrator to gain a deeper understanding of how to use the offset path tools and multiple layers to replicate the design. Do you know much about designing it in Illustrator, as opposed to CAD, or alternatively point me in the direction of any further resources?
I’m glad this worked for you! - You should post a picture of your work. I however don’t know anything about Illustrator and have no insight to offer sorry. Hopefully there may be some resources on the internet.
If you have never seen OpenSCAD this is probably a bad example to start with. There are plenty of OpenSCAD resources already available. One I liked that explains a lot is:
