24 August 2015

Todays result - chocolate stencils

I have made some chocolate stencils to order for a friend who owns a cafe.

I received the designs as images in an email. I converted the images to black and white. A custom program traced the images, smoothed the lines a little, and exported the resulting shapes as polygons to OpenSCAD files. I manually identified the polygons I wanted and used the count of pixels in the original images to scale the patterns to the right dimensions. Finally the patterns where subtracted from a stencil frame I had created previous project.

Once the steps where in place to process an image into a 3d model it only took a few minuted to convert the remaining patterns. Printing each stencil took about 13 minutes.

The stencils have some wavy edges that stem from the pixels in the original images. I remembered after I was finished that Inkscape may have been a better way to read the shapes from the original images. If I do something similar again I will try  creating a vector representation of the patterns using Inkscape's "Trace bitmap" function.

I am happy with the results, and hope the cafe owner will enjoy them when I deliver them tomorrow.


The stencils in transparent, yellow, and orange.