Designing and 3D Printing a Cookie Cutter (step by step!) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I'm here with a very special Goodie of the Month. I've been 3d printing a lot of my gifts lately, and I thought it would be fun to make one for you guys as well!  So just for fun, I thought I'd show you step by step how I went about making this.

A quick note before we start as well; other than Sai, every program I used to make this little project is completely free! So if you want to make your own file ready for 3d printing, you can use your drawing program of choice (and Inkscape, Tinkercad, and Cura) to make it come to life.

It was my first time making something like this, and even with that I'm still pretty happy with my workflow and final product :) Let's take a look!

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First and foremost, I needed to draw my design. Because penguins are kind of my thing and work quite well for the holidays, I came up with this. I sketched up this little dude in sai, as I do with all of my artwork. If you don't have sai, any general image making program can get the job done as long as your final product is clean enough for Inkscape to trace.

From there,  it was time for the lineart of this image. I wanted this design to have not just a general outline, but an area to stamp/imprint the cookie dough as well.

With this in place, it was time to start thinking in 3d - I had to design the grip next. This does three things for the cookie cutter:

- gives the user a place to hold on to

- provides a place for the stamp pieces to attach to the rest of the cookie cutter

- gives the print extra strength

Luckily this isn't too hard to make. I just added a nice chunky stroke around my existing lineart, and added a bit of a crossbeam in the middle to give it extra support. I could have made this grip completely solid, but having a few holes in place saves me material and allows me to see where I'm cutting the dough.

Now that everything is nice and cleaned up, I could save each part of this puzzle as a separate image.

Exported and ready to go, I then live traced these silhouettes in Inkscape (a free vector program that I've never used before now. It's quite handy!). This turned my simple PNGs into scalable SVGs; perfect for extruding into a 3d model! 

Now for the fun part - let's turn this baby 3d!

I could've used Blender to extrude these, but I went for an even simpler approach. Autodesk has a free online tool called Tinkercad, and is perfect for quick extrusions of vectors. I adjusted the heights of each piece, merged them together, exported the model, and called it good!

More program hopping, but we're in the home stretch! Load up the model into your slicer of choice (Mine is Cura), slice and dice the model, and bring it on over to the 3d printer!

4ish hours and a few grams of PLA later... I have a one of a kind tool, ready to make a small army of penguin cookies! <3

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I know this is a little different from my usual stuff, but I hope you enjoyed this little step by step regardless. Until next time, yall - Happy holidays! :)