New Website

The techroom website has moved to this address:

www.iduarts-shop.org

Totals for Fall 09 Semester

After some tedious work, the laser cutter and 3DP logs have been digitized. Here are some interesting numbers:

Laser Cutter Totals

Files Logged: 131

Hypothetical Total Income: 462.12
Confirmed Total Income: 407.38

Time Logged: 1453.07 minutes (~24.22 hours)

Number of Files using Stock Material: 34 out of 131, or 25.95%

Small: 15
Medium: 8
Large: 3

Files Run by non-ID majors: 20 out of 131, or 15.27%
GD: 9
Multimedia: 4
Crafts: 3
Sculpture: 1
Unknown: 3

Files by Technician
Jesse Gerard: 54
Kyle Stetz: 50
Doug Bucci: 8
Thomas Reynolds: 6
Meg Talley: 5
Woody: 1

3D Printer Totals

Files Logged: 8

Confirmed Total Income: 265.00
Income from Model Material: 107.35
Income from Support Material: 139.65
Income from Tray Fee ($2): 18

Total Model Material Used: 21.47 in^2
Total Support Material Used: 27.95

Files Run by Non-ID Majors: 1 (Sculpture)

Files by Technician
Jesse Gerard: 3
Meg Talley: 3
Kyle Stetz: 2

My personal thanks to everyone who filled out job request forms in their entirety.

-Kyle

Laser Cut Text: Removing Counters

If you’ve tried to incorporate text into a laser cut file (to be cut all the way through, as opposed to engraved), you have probably realized that any letters with a closed interior space (referred to in typography as a counter) will not cut correctly, since the interior space will be completely separated from the piece. There are two ways we can get around this; the first is to find some fonts without counters, and the second is to get in there and hack apart the font of your choosing in order to eliminate counters.

Fonts without Counters

UArts Academic Computing laptops come with a fairly large font library; unfortunately there are only four fonts that don’t contain counters. They are:

Braggadocio, Nyx, Portago, and Stencil.

Even more unfortunately, none of these really get the job done if typography is of importance. Hence, we must open Adobe Illustrator and do it ourselves.

Chopping Up Your Fonts

It is definitely worth the time and effort to hack up a font if you plan on incorporating it in a cut. It’s not as painful as it sounds, and it shouldn’t take that long since there are only a few letters in any given font with counters.

In Adobe Illustrator, put down some text and highlight it. Under the Type menu, select Create Outlines (Shift+Apple+O). This turns the text into paths which can be edited like any other shape in Illustrator. Ungroup the letters (Shift+Apple+G) so you can edit them individually.

The concept is to draw a shape over the letter that you are going to remove. Here is the path for a lowercase g :

We are going to use the set of tools called Pathfinder in Illustrator. Open it by going to Window>Pathfinder. Select both the letter and the path you just created, and click on the second button from the left in the top row of the Pathfinder window, which is called Minus Front. This simply subtracts the shape in front from the shape behind it, creating a new path as a result.

Our lowercase g now looks like this:

Easy!

Keep in mind that if you remove all of the counters in a face, you can save the Illustrator file and bring it up any time. The paths can be imported into Rhino easily as well.

Here’s a little something to get you started… (Zero was totally overlooked so you’ll have to edit that one yourself!)

http://www.mchalegentile.com/kyle/helvetica_neue_stencil.ai

beauuuutiful.