Black Cats - With simple image-to-3D-design tutorial

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, but black cats remain lucky at any time of year! Place them on your windows, tuck them inside lamps, or hide them around the house. Choose from solid, Voronoi, and spiral designs. Let light shine through the patterned designs, or use glow-in-the-dark filament to add some spooky flair. These cats are fast and fun to print, but the main goal of this Thing is to provide a tutorial that demonstrates how quickly and easily you can transform an image from the web into a cool 3D-printable shape. Read on to find out how! Print Settings Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: .3mm Notes: The cat models are 1mm thick, and the patterned ones have patterns starting at 0.5mm high. With .3mm settings, my Replicator translated this into 2 layers of base and 1 layer of pattern. If you're swapping filament to change color for the pattern then you'll have to be quick to pause the printer right after the second layer. How I Designed This Overview of the design process You can create 3D-printable files for these cats or any other images in just a few minutes using Google Image Search, an online SVG file converter like Online-Convert.com, and Tinkercad. I'll walk through everything step-by-step in great detail below, but don't let my verbosity scare you away. The process is simple and quick: Find an image, convert it to SVG format, upload the image to Tinkercad for scaling and decoration, and then download for 3D printing. It only took about 10 minutes to create the first cat design. Step 1: Find a good image The first step is to find the image that you would like to use in your design. You can draw, create, or photograph any image you like, but of course the easiest thing to do is to Google it. Go to Google Image Search and type what you are looking for into the search bar. I typed "black cat" and then clicked on the "Clipart" button at the top of the results. The very first image was perfect; thank you, clipartpanda.com! Clip art, line drawings, black-and-white or one-color images, and images with transparent backgrounds are often good candidates for turning into 3D models. You can use the "Search Tools" button in Google Image Search to restrict your search to different colors or types of images. Here are some things to keep in mind when selecting an image: If your image has disconnected pieces then it will 3D print with disconnected pieces, unless you give it some kind of backing or connectors after importing. Mine looked pretty good but it was giant! Step 2: Import the image into Tinkercad Uploading your SVG file to Tinkercad is easy. First, get a free account at www.tinkercad.com if you don't have one already; then open a new Design. In the right column menu, open the "Import" tab and then use "Choose File" to browse for the SVG file on your computer. Once you've located and selected the desired file, press the "Import" button. The upload process can take a minute or two if your design was particularly complicated. After the upload process is complete you should see a 3D object with 10mm thickness, whose outline is determined by your image. At this point you'll know immediately if your image was a good choice; it will either look good or it won't. Step 3: Resize and repair the extruded model in Tinkercad To resize the design to something more reasonable, zoom out and grab the corner selection dot, then hold Shift while dragging the model to a smaller size. Note that this will also make the model thinner, so let's fix that in the next step. Step 4: Download your design Now you're ready to download your 3D-printable file! Go to the "Share" tab and select "Download STL." You can now use this file to print out your black cat design.