Prepping Files for CNC Milling

Our next module for PPD will be working with the Bantam Tools Milling Machine. After a short demo in class where we engraved a dog tag, we were tasked with getting some files ready to mill.

I started out wanting to make a kind of wavy pattern. I found a tutorial that was supposed to give me this sand dune-like facade but I couldn’t quite figure it out. I fiddled around in Grasshopper to try to find where I messed up but couldn’t get to the desired result. Maybe next week!

After that, I moved on towards a kind of optical illusion 2D pattern. I followed a Parametric House tutorial and then played around until I got a cool result.

From there, I brought the file into Illustrator and made the strokes thicker. I thought it would be good to go — project done! — but I ran into more issues.

For some reason, I was unable to fill the closed paths for engraving. I tried all the Illustrator tricks I knew, but could never figure it out.

The next morning, I showed it to RJ and he was able to help me out. We had to expand the appearance to see that the fill opacity was actually at zero. One of the issues might have been that I exported it as an SVG instead of an AI file from Rhino. There also could have been some appearance settings in Rhino that messed with the conversion to SVG. But once I opened the file in the Bantam Tools software it worked!