I had a customer walk in Friday that wants me to cut his company logo into a sheet of 12ga. mild steel.
I have been using Fusion 360 for almost a month now and getting rather comfortable with designing and cutting parts but totally clueless when it comes to duplicating a company logo with images and text in it.
Looking for some insight on how to do this.
Did he give you a file or just a picture?
If he gave you a file just convert it to a svg then insert it into a new sketch and size it.
At that point I normally save it as a dxf and reopen it to work on it.
If the image is a raster file (.jpg, .png, .bmp, .gif) you’ll need to convert it to a vector image. This can be done by using the image trace feature in Inkscape (or other vector image program) or you can manually import the image and trace the outlines you want to cut. If tracing by hand, it can be tedious if it’s a complex image. F360 is not ideal for doing this, but it can be done. I think you “import->canvas” and then can sketch with it as the background…
Ideally, if this is a company logo, the designer that created it built it in a program that uses vector graphics and they exported it as SVG or .ai (Adobe Illustrator) which you can work with directly and no need to image trace the file. In this case, you just need to check the file to make sure the paths are good. You can take an SVG file straight into fusion360 and go from there.
You will probably run into some design issues no matter the source file (vector or raster) that will need some tweaking of the paths or adjustments to the loops to make sure they are closed/connected properly.
Bit map tracing in Inkscape is great. I’ve found though that font usually end up rounding themselves a bit even its working with a high quality png. But it doesn’t always end up being noticeable after being cut.
This was traced in Inkscape with very minimal cleanup afterwards.
He came in with a picture on his phone asking if it was something I could do.
I said yes but that I would need to get back to him with a file format. Not sure what he has available because its a one man shop that has a BBQ Trailer and pretty sure he had someone make his logo for him.
I will see what he has available and keep you posted with progress.
In Fusion you can paste an image in the background. Then you trace over it with lines, circles, etc till you have the logo in the drawing. Once you have the drawing scale it to the desired size, make adjustments for cutting (like insides of A’s, o’s e’s etc) .
I’ve used this method to make silhouette style signs for for Farms that have a prominent barn as the shape of the sign and the name inside, or the outline of a vintage tractor, family tree (like the family planted a tree 5 Generations ago now it’s the company logo).
It takes time to do it right but it cuts down on the number of line segments (faster cut time) than some of the bmp to vector conversion programs.