I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. (Lao Tzu)
Welcome back!
I am Enrico and I love to simplify the processes, whether it's a script or my life. One of my hobbies for years is to create tutorials and the password is to simplify.
Idea of the Day
I love board games, but what if my kids lose the precious meeples? What would be the quickest, most free and easiest way to create a nice replacement Meeple army?
This tutorial actually applies to any form of typical pieces of board games, whether they be meeples, counters, tokens or whatever.
The Model
Let's start with the piece we want to get, in this case, a meeple for Carcassone.
There are many methods, it is a very simple form. You could take a cad and draw it, use blender, zbrush, notepad ... But you may not know how to use them, so why not choose the easy way, Google Search!
We download a clean and perspective-free image.
Once downloaded, it will probably be in jpg, png or another format. These formats are not suitable for converting to 3D, so we would need to convert it to SVG. The SVG format creates the geometry of the design, without losing detail and without using pixels, excellent for resizing it and representing it in 3D or for laser engraving.
We could convert it with InkScape or something else, but why complicate life? Let's use any free file conversion site!
Convert SVG to 3D
Let's finally work in 3D! Thanks to a MyMiniFactory contest, I met the fantastic Tinkercad. Tinkercad is a CAD: free, online and simple; what do you want more?
With Tinkercad you can quickly create many printable and exportable objects directly on MyMiniFactory, thanks to the convenient send button to MyMiniFactory.
Registration is free, and after it will be sufficient to create a new project which will be assigned a random name and saved automatically online.
- Press the import button, top right.
- Select the newly converted SVG file.
- Select Art to set the actual size of the object.
- Set the size, my Carcassone meeple measures Height 18mm x Width19 x Thickness 10mm.
Fantastic! You created your spare part in a minute, without knowing 3D modeling and in a very simple way.
Let's give our 3D drawing to our favorite slicer, by pressing the export button in STL.
Finally, why don't you try to customize your meeple?
Tinkercad offers many easy tools to edit your 3D model, with many free video tutorials.
Your custom meeple, it would be a shame to abandon it in your PC, press the send button to MyMiniFactory, to automatically publish it in your profile!
Who am I?
Hi, I'm Enrico Sartori, and I enjoy writing tutorials suitable for beginners. I love Zbrush, Tinkercad and RaspberryPi. I own an Ender 3 and a Photon-S and publish only on MyMiniFactory.
I hope this mini-tutorial will come in handy.