3D (STL) to 2D (SVG)

Back in 2015 I used Rhino to convert 3D files into 2D vector files that could be used in illustrations, instructions, etc. You can see what I’m talking about in 2D to 3D to 2D. Sadly, Rhino is not cheap, and I do not have access to it. Instead I would often do fake versions of this technique in OpenSCAD, which you can see in Enclosure Prototyping.

Well, thanks to Trammell Hudson, I can throw all that away! Checkout this post plotter.vision – STL to SVG and then go to plotter.vision and give it a spin.

The code is available on GitHub, and my favorite part is in the README:

I’m not a javascript programmer, so this is probably not very well written.

And yet… It exists, and it works. It may not be perfect, but the great thing about open source is that it can be improved by others in the future.

I’ve included a few results in this posts of things I’ve modeled in OpenSCAD. I think they turned out well and I can see using this tool in the future. Thanks, Trammell!