3D Designing Your Models
***This document will show how to manufacture the Lemon robots using Adobe Illustrator for preparing the files and an Epilog laser cutter for manufacturing. Some of the steps or programs us ed can be changed, i.e. you can model from any program as long as you extract .dxf files of the pieces you will manufacture. You can access the execution of the steps from the video index. Click here for a for extensive course in prototyping with Fusion 360.***
3D Design Export Tutorial
Prepare your sketchs!
1) Click on the outer surface of the bodies you’ve created and make a sketch. The easiest way to do this is by selecting a surface and projecting it (any sort of command to create a sketch on the surface will work for this, it’s faster than crating a sketch from your toolbar) Right click on the sketch and select “Save as dxf” Repeat this for all your bodies.
2) Open Adobe Illustrator and make a new file.
3) Select Milimeters as your unit, 560 mm as width and 340 mm as height and a landscape orientation. This should be the dimensions of your material.
4) Import your dxf files and arrange them to your liking. Make sure the corresponding finger joints are on the same axis; some laser cutters have a noticable margin of error and the final pieces might not fit together. Don’t worry about how it looks, the goal is to waste as little material as possible.
5) Select the parts you want to cut and change their stroke to 0,25. The part you want to raster should have a stroke of 0,7 and above. This applies any text you want to raster. Additionally any closed geometry that is colored/filled and images will raster.
6) Save the file as an .ai file.
