How to Make Keychains With Drawings
Beyond working as a Community Manager at Shapeways, I love to draw. Recently I realized that it could be cool to turn some of them into products. By using the Keychain creator and Adobe Capture on my iphone. I was able to quickly take an idea from my head and turn it into a readily available 3D printable file for printing. The whole process took me about half an hour, making this process a great way to start 3d designing.
First I made a drawing, then I took a picture of it with Adobe Capture and turned it into a vector image. This tool is great because it lets you choose which lines to use and smooth things out. As you can see the light on my drawing isn't great and I made it on a lined piece of paper, but Capture can still find the shape I want.
Once I make the raw vector image on my phone it is automatically put into m Adobe creative cloud library. I just need to connect to wifi and hop on my computer, open Adobe Illustrator and find the little ghost.
The image has all the vector anchors and handles already present, this is a huge timesafer if I need to make some adjustments so it can turn into a printable 3D object later on. Looking ahead, I know that the 2D to 3D creator is going to extrude the black parts into physical material and turn the white parts into open space. This means that I have to make sure all the black lines are thick enough to print and interconnected so they come out as one piece. The image can also be greyscale to show thickness. In this case I decided to do both to show you the results.
The eyes need to be connect to the rest of the body if I wanted them to print as one part, so I draw some new lines to connect them. I also tweak some of the anchor points in the lines to thicken them and clean it up.
After, I port it over to Adobe photoshop to add the grey. This will fill it in with some material but allow the lines I've drawn to be strong outlines. I also decided to fill in the black area around the eyes so its solid for aesthetic reasons.
I have my final image ready so I go to the Shapeways Keychain creator and click "upload design" to load my image. It takes a moment and shows me an interactive 3D rendering of the model generated from the image. On the side I can control the perimeters and size to make sure its exactly what I want.
Since this is a keychain, I need to add something to attach the chain. I click the blue button that sales "+ Add a loop for a chain" and then right-click on the interactive view of the model where I want it to be. Again, I can change the perimeters of loop so that its the way I want.
Once I'm ready I can click the button at the bottom to finish my keychain, choose a material and place my order. I click "create my keychain" and wait until I get a notification that its ready. I can also go to the "my models" page and find it there.
Using the keychain creator, the possibilities for turning my drawings into products are endless. What will you create?
How to Make Keychains With Drawings
Source: https://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/23063-how-i-turned-my-drawing-into-a-keychain.html