I'm back in the 3D game bitches gentlemen and gentlerwomen ! XP

I'm back to 3d printiiiiiiiing...

Well, okay. 3D designing.

<rant> you can skip this

MakeX is as unresponsive as ever, so I just decided to get back into 3D modelling without waiting for them to send me a printer.

With any luck, they'll actually send it to me before 2019 begins XP

</rant>

So, today I wanted to a make my first seedable post on Cent, which is a small Ethereum based bounty/blogging platform.

Users can upload their questions/posts, and associate an optional bounty (say, the 5 highest voted responses divide 50$ of Eth between them), or, which is the new mechanic, hope someone seeds their post.

Seeding is to reward the creator of the post with some Eth, which also gives you a small percentage of whatever other people seed the post with afterwards (so, similar to curation here on Steemit, except people give a specific amount, not just their upvote "value").

So to get off on a good start; I decided to post a tutorial here; and on Cent, about how I created this simple Cent keyring:

I used my new design tool, SelfCad, to do this.

First step: Get that logo

I ripped the Cent logo off the internet in a nice white/transparent format that I could work with:

I know you can't see anything if you're in Day Mode here on steemit, the image is completely white XP

Image to 3D

Then used the Image to 3D functionality:

Neato !

adjusting the shape and keeping what we want

So, this shape's not pretty AT ALL, plus I really just want the rings that compose the logo, not that blocky backside.

I have plans for those rings... oh yes I do...

So I scale the shape in the direction of the logo itself

Then create a slightly larger and wider cube

Now I want to remove the blocky background, keeping only the ring shapes.

So let's position our block in the middle of the other one

Move it so just the parts we want intersect between the two models (yes I could just ahve intersected what we didn't want and removed it like that. there's always plenty of ways to do these things.)

Stitch and scoop is how SelfCad says boolean functions ;)

Create a proper base

Now let's generate a proper background.

The angle option let's us keep just half of the model easy peasy !

copy and scale this part, so that we can remove the protruding part in the back (I know it's a bit roundabout, but It seemed the easiest way I could think of to generate a cut from a spherical object XP)

Create the basic keychain, without loop

Now we've got the back, we can reuse stitch and scoop to scoop out our logo from our base:

Add an attachment loop, for proper keychainization XP

Here I've rotated the model to it's side, and added two flat cylinders.

One intersects our model precisely, with the exact same width as our model, the other one cuts through it's middle, ready to be Scooped out

scaling blind

I tried my best to adjust the scale properly, but without a printer, or a ruler at home, I can't be absolutely sure.

After some mental experimentation (I want that printeeeeeeeeer sniff), and some more research, I ended up with 2.5 mm for the thickness.

Gcode generator built-in !

SelfCad also has some 3D printing utilities built-in, like the ability to generate Gcode, the code that a 3d printer reads to determine how to print a file.

Saving, exporting, etc...

Heres the model on MyMiniFactory and the post on Cent