Since Egg-Bot is now fully-functional, I figured it was time to start making some SVGs of my own and doing some plotting…
Well, maybe “of my own” is stretching it a bit… The first one I started with was actually this jolly roger image, which I ran through the Voronoi Stippler, and then imported into Inkscape.
The plot took about an hour, which is probably way too long, as I could tell Egg-Bot was working it’s little motors out… Next time I’ll need to simplify things a bit when I create the stippling.
I’ll also be working on converting existing EPS images/logos to SVG files that are suitable for the Egg-Bot (and once I do, I’ll post them to Thingiverse.) For now, just keep an eye out for more egg-plotting fun right here.
(Note: For some reason Adrian Secord has removed the download link for VoronoiStippler.app, and his personal site stippling.org, does not resolve for me…)
6 replies on “Pirate Eggs!”
The Eggbot extension package for inkscape has a pretty awesome hatched fill, I think it would substantially decrease the amount of time it took to print this. You would need to do the vector trace in a different way though. Nice print!
Oh yeah, I’ve started to work on getting to know Inkscape a bit more and experiment with the extension. This was just the first plot of many… I can tell now I’m going to go through a lot of eggs at my house. :)
For something like the skull & crossbones, you could probably get away with the Trace Bitmap feature in Inkscape (very similar to “Live Trace” in Illustrator). It’s in the Path menu. Fiddling around with the options there should give you a really clean vector, then it is just a matter of selecting the connected chunks that you want to be drawn solid and running the Extensions > Eggbot Contributed > Hatch Fill command. I had great success with this method.
I’m playing with the hatch fill right now… :)
I’ve got to get used to Inkscape. It’s been many years since I used Illustrator, and even then, I didn’t use it very much for anything besides converting files. (I’m more of a raster guy than a vector guy.)
I’ll keep playing with vectors, but I also want to do some cool stuff with stippling as well.
Got any good SVG files you’ve used at DW?
Crop Circles & Storm Trooper. The crop circles are hatched and ready to go, the storm trooper will work as is, I did it before I figured out about hatching so I just manually colored in the gun and a few shadows. There is an example pack on the website which has some good geometric stuff. I also did a 5 color logo using layers & multiple pens which was probably the most impressive of them all (see Layers tab on far right of eggbot control).
One thing I’m still really struggling with is the width of the stroke in Inkscape versus the actual pen. I did a cross-hatched design, but because the pen was so much wider it was just plotting the same spot over and over. I’ll try the ones you posted and see what I can get. (Still a lot of experimentation! Which, luckily… is fun. :)