Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Drawing and first printing of the flower pattern

I started drawing this pattern a few weeks ago, but haven't had time to finish it lately. Today I sat down to do last lines and add fillings to the lines.

What I first realised was that I forgot how to do the filling, so I opened the EggBot Wiki tutorial I used earlier.

What I also realised was that I forgot to write about the trick I invented to make the filling and the outline match more. If after you duplicate your path you go to Path → Inset for one or two times, the filling will not cross the outline and it will look better on printing.

Once I finished, let's the printing begin!

However I put every unique pattern to a different layer, first I tried to print it with only one colour. I wanted to test the whole drawing without making any mistake in the pen changing process.



As you can see the filling is not inside the outline for some reasons. I have had the same bug with my Google Men drawing, but I haven't spent time so far to examine it. To be honest I thought I did something wrong when I changed the different pens, but in this case it happened with the first layer without any pen changes.
I decided to try Extensions → EggBot → Reorder Paths for Speed.

version 1
After the optimisation the second try looked much better! At least for the leaves... :( I'm still not sure if this setting solved the problem, probably not, but now I didn't experience the same problem, I found new ones!

Filling is not perfect
Lines are not perfectly in line
I should place the pen higher

Besides my other obvious problems, the round patterns were not round at all, so I stretched the whole picture as much as I could.

version 2
The second black print looked better, stretching made its magic, round objects look almost totally round. However I still have problems with the filling. For the colour print I try to set a bit on the fillings. Who knows, I might get it right this time.

I also removed the blue flower from the left, because on the egg it was next to the pink one on the right and it did not look good. I replaced it with the orange one and kept the colour blue. Hopefully a not-filled flower will look better next to the filled pink one.

version 3

And this is how the colour print looked:







I can see that it is still not perfect, so before I publish the .svg file on my Thingiverse page I will work a bit more on it.

Thanks to my grandparents for providing eggs to experiment!

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