I’m using Adobe Illustrator. I make beautiful designs that I want to 3D print extrusions of. This appears to be very difficult. Here is what I’ve tried:
All scenarios start with me making a drawing in Illustrator, then I…
export as SVG, import into CAD (TinkerCAD, Fusion). Problem: Circles are not circles. They always have corners. I want a circle, not a 32-sided polygon. Not acceptable.
use online AI > SVG converter. Same problem.
export as OBJ from AI, import into Bambu Studio. Design is effectively gone, and BS tells me there are “4 non-manifold edges”. Fix Model is only available on Windows, I only have a Mac.
I tried to use the online one BS links to. Same problem: Design is gone.
I delete enough parts of the AI design to get it to import without “non-manifold edges” but it’s inverse. Back to AI to invert it, but now we’re back to the non-manifold edges problem.
I’ve tried half a dozen online converters, same problems with all of them.
Tried importing into Fusion. What Fusion imports appears to be garbage wherein every tiny face on the model is a different color. It won’t allow me to extrude it as one part, and if I export, we’re back to the non-manifold edges problem.
Tried exporting as DXF from AI. Compound paths do not survive this operation, so all text with QAROPADB has the voids filled in. Not acceptable.
I have even tried rasterizing it at 1000dpi and then using AI to trace it. Same problems. There is something about how AI does compound paths that BS just cannot cope with.
Bottom line: Does anyone have a method for bringing a design made in Adobe Illustrator into Bambu Studio with any reasonable fidelity? I am tearing my hair out on this. TIA.
I import svgs into Blender, convert them to meshes and extrude them, do 3d print check etc then export as stl. Not sure if you’re familiar with Blender, can give more detail if needed.
I have downloaded Blender, but I am not “familiar” with it. Would you be willing to turn up the detail knob a little? I’d appreciate it. At first glance, importing SVGs into blender has the same problems with letters with holes in them.
Blender has quite a steep learning curve and a few ‘idiosyncrasies’. But there is lots of info and support online about how to use it, and specifically for 3d printing as well. Blender is a mesh modeller primarily but has good bezier curve toolbox as well. So, if you file–>import svg, you will have a bezier curve object in Blender which you can adjust and edit, and even extrude directly. To 3d print it, you would convert it to a mesh object and then file–> export it as an stl.
If you follow a basic ‘beginning with blender’ video, enough to familiarise yourself with the interface, you could go straight to importing an svg , then converting to mesh then extruding, to see if that’s what you are looking for. Then invest time in learning a bit more.
I’m happy to help if you want to send a file over?
The simple answer is: NO, Hell no, ■■■■ NO!!! My best advice is to stop wasting your time trying to do this impossible task. I know what you want and it can’t be done in AI or SVG. The non-manifold shapes are the least of your problem.
You’re chasing something that I’ve been chasing since 1994, so I feel your pain acutely. My last attempt in this realm was in 2019 with Adobe Illustrator and vector-based graphics when I tried to reverse engineer my company’s logo into a high-quality format for a CNC machine to create a metal plaque. It just doesn’t work—the technology was never designed with today’s high pixel counts in mind. I checked all the resources I still have on my old machine and did a web search—I would love to find a solution for myself—but the state of the art hasn’t progressed; it’s still stuck in the '80s.
If I sound as frustrated as you its because I am. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars of my own money on products that just simply won’t do what the product brochure says they will do. Adobe is among the worst of the miscreants in the graphics software industry and there’s a reason why they are one of the most hated companies in software. OK, rant over let me get off my soapbox for now.
Put simply, you’re trying to work in the wrong medium! Quit wasting your time.
AI and SVG were originally designed for very low-resolution graphic work, similar to 640x480 pixels in the 1980s. They both use Bezier curves, which theoretically should scale infinitely from a mathematical standpoint. However, no software implements it that way. These formats were designed to transmit efficiently over 1200Kb modems not 10Gb Ethernet of today. Also, AI was intended for creating attractive images for T-shirts and infographics, not for the precision found in CAD.
I can’t sugarcoat this, you’re trying to draw pencil art with a half inch crayon.
Here’s how it should work but doesn’t.
(AI or SVG) ==> DXG ==> STEP
The process as outlined here doesn’t work because the input is for SH|T to begin with. Remember the old phrase “Garbage in Garbage Out”?
Disclaimer: I hope someone reading this can prove me wrong, I really do. Here’s a simple challenge. Create just a simple Cylinder SVG file in a drawing program like Inkscape and import it to the slicer and produce as smooth an object as the one on the right. FYI: The one on the left was done using a simple cylinder primitive from the slicer.
Microsoft 3D builder is actually pretty good at extruding shapes from images, but it has to be a bitmap file so you’re gonna want to export pretty big and will have to figure out the scale later.
I got bad new for you bro, 3Builder is worse. It is a pixel tool not an illustrator tool which is what the OP was looking for. Microsoft 3D Paint has some of those tools but at the end of the day, recommending either one of those tools is likes suggesting Notepad for desktop publishing. The tools are merely Microsoft’s demonstrators/science projects that they released with Windows 8. In fact, I’m told that they removed these from the Microsoft store for Win 11 users so if you have it on your system and are ever forced to restore your computer, it is likely you will not be able to reinstall those utilities.
I don’t know what @Olias is ranting about, but you can absolutely use SVG files exported from Illustrator to create high resolution 3D models for FDM printing.
This whole premise about Illustrator and SVG files being for ultra-low-resolution raster images is completely bunk and could clearly be demonstrated by importing a DXF into SolidWorks or another solid modeling suite, extruding and exporting as STEP file. I’ve done this plenty of times and I’ve also imported SVGs into Blender to extrude and export as STL. I run a 2.5D CNC machine at work which specifically imports Illustrator or other 2D CAD files and works completely fine.
All of these are completely valid methods to achieve your designed goal and unfortunately there’s not really a great way around doing it through one of these methods (as far as I know.)
This is probably one of the simplest ways though:
Simply import a raster image into Cura, and boom extrusion. It effectively treats grayscale tones as a depth map rendering any image into a lithophane. It’s not completely smooth, but as long as your source bitmap is high enough resolution, it will work fine.
There are probably other software that will solve the problem in a similar way, but there’s one concrete option for you.
Also at first thought on this point, please verify you don’t have overlapping lines. This can create problems with intersecting faces which messed with the way meshes are interpreted. STLs are similarly interpreted to compound paths in Illustrator - if a shape encloses another shape fully, it becomes a negative space but if there’s a hole or duplicate, it will cause problems with how it is interpreted.
Talk is cheap, bro. Prove it. White papers and theory prove nothing, back up your words with a concrete example. I’ll even make this challenge easy for you: show me a smooth STL cylinder from an AI or SVG source file created in AI or Inkscape within the slicer that has nice, smooth arcs like my example above that was produced in CAD.
I’d love to be proven wrong, but words in a post won’t help the original poster, will they? Unless you can show proof and how you arrived at it. Like I said, talk is cheap, and I’d love to be proven wrong with an actual example, not a white paper.
I support @ipmcc’s frustration because they have clearly done the task and encountered the same frustrations as the rest of us who have actually battled this issue.
Do you have access to Adobe Capture? I use it all the time to convert svgs and it’s fantastic in terms of getting really smooth curves. My process is usually draw something in Procreate, take it into Adobe Capture, export an SVG and then take that into TinkerCAD or get out my laptop and load up my old and busted 2008 version of 3DStudioMax, and I get really nice results.
I’ve done this a lot. The last thing I did this way was a doodlebob, image sourced on google, put in Illustrator and traced, cleaned up, made a back, then saved as an SVG. Orcaslicer eats up the SVG no problem and I have a 3D extrusion.
I did it like 5 years ago to recreate a civil war era coat button for a customer duplicating the vintage text on the rear face of the button. This is not hard. This is not new news. There are lots of ways to do it if you know a few basic software and have a basic understanding of file types and formats.
I’m not sure if it’s only an OrcaSlicer thing, but both OS and Cura can accept either raster or SVG files and make extrusions based on it. It’s been some time since I used Cura, but I remember extruding raster images there and it seems I cannot do that in OS. But at least since I did it recently for the Doodlebob, you can load SVG files directly into OS and skip any intermediary entirely.
Thanks to everyone for their input! Lots of ideas here to chew on.
I want to elaborate a little bit (And stick with me until the end for the “good” news).
I know well that the real answer is to use a ‘first class’ CAD program (AutoCAD, SolidWorks, etc) and develop my designs in a CAD program in the first place. My “main” job is as the owner of a pre-revenue hardware startup (which is how I justified buying my P1S in the first place.) Doing 3D prints for folks is my ‘side-hustle’. I simply can’t justify thousands of dollars per year for AutoCAD or SolidWorks, so I’ve been trying hard to find cheap/free solutions to do that side work.
Since buying my P1S, I’ve actually gotten remarkable mileage out of using Autodesk’s TinkerCAD, this particular design is just too complex, and it’s for someone else and not just me noodling around, so quality matters.
Autodesk Fusion is effectively useless to me, because every click has ~3 second latency. Fusion appears to be so bought-in to the cloud-first approach that every click appears to block on a network round-trip to their servers. Whether that’s the underlying cause or not, it is unusable to me.
I used FormZ a lot in college (almost 30 years ago) for 3D architectural design, and they have a free version. I thought the muscle memory would come back, but it didn’t. Also, sadly, resources for “how do I do XYZ with FormZ?” are largely useless because of the cavernous differences between the main version and the free version. After a day and a half and no meaningful progress, I gave up.
Being a former software engineer, I looked at OpenSCAD, but I haven’t really written code for ~10 years, so it would mean not only returning to programming, but also learning an entirely new language that seems to have a lot of “quirks.” I gave up on this pretty quickly.
I also spent a few fun days with OnShape. It’s not free, but it has a 180 day free trial, so that was pretty compelling. I actually think that it’s an extremely compelling and powerful package (as well as one of the most impressive browser-based applications I’ve ever seen. SO FAST!) The problem is that, as a parametric modeler, you have to constrain everything, and I would rather get fast results so I can iterate quickly, and not spend hours and hours trying to fully-constrain my design. Fusion wants this from you, too, but is much less cranky about not getting it.
I tried using Inkscape, but for whatever reason it seems to crash about every 8 or 10 minutes of use for me. Pretty much a non-starter for anything more than file format conversion.
I’ve had a lot of experience working with Illustrator over my career, and my muscle memory for it came back within 2-3 hours, and I had re-created my design from scratch in Illustrator by lunch time. But then I hit these road blocks.
Now for the good part: I got something to work! I exported my design from Illustrator to a PNG raster at 1000ppi. Then I uploaded that to VTracer, fiddled with the parameters a little, downloaded the resulting SVG, and lo and behold, Bambu Studio liked the output! My circles and curves looked smooth as silk, and the printed output looks great.
Do I wish this process had been easier? Holy hell, yes! Am I disappointed that Bambu Studio isn’t better at handling files from mainstream packages like Illustrator? Likewise, yes. Love it or hate it, Illustrator is the ‘lingua franca’ of vector design. But at the end of the day, I got across the finish line. I hope this thread will help other folks later.
I have had pretty good success with SVG exported from Illustrator and imported into a Fusion Sketch. I sometimes have to make corrections because I sometimes get broken lines, but overall it has been good. Circles are actually circles and curves are curves. Sometimes a circle is broken up into multiple joined curves, but it scales and prints like a perfect circle.
I used this method to make the symbol on this, and have used it for more complex drawings as well.
For reference, the first public version of SVG was in 2001, not the 80s and as a vector format, it is not in any way restricted to a tiny canvas size, at least nothing as small as the VGA dimension suggested, dimensions are provided as precision floating point numbers.
Even OpenSCAD, which sometimes causes derision and misplaced hatred, works with them perfectly.
Quite obviously, resolution of the mesh is not a trait of either the creating app nor the file format, but the importer / converter which controls the resulting mesh resolution / # of triangles.
OK, rant over let me get off my soapbox for now.
