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Sometimes you need/want to print something easy. A 2D design which you want to use as a keychain or an anchor you want to transfer to a coat hanger.
There are two examples on this weblog. I made a location sign which you can find here:
http://lucstechblog.blogspot.com/2019/04/always-knowing-where-you-are.html
And I took a 2D design and altered into a coat hanger. You can find that story here.
To make a 3D print from a 2D design you need to do 2 important steps. Most pictures are in JPG format so you need to trasform that to an STL file.
The way I was normally doing that was by first transferring the JPG to an SVG file with convertio: https://convertio.co/nl/jpg-svg/
The next step was to convert the SVG file to an STL file using Tinkercad.
This works just fine and in Tinkercad you can adjust the size of the object before you convert it to STL.
The drawback is that you need an account for Tinkercad and that the process is slow (logging in, opening a new projact, loading the SVG).
So I did a quick search in Google and found an online SVG to STL converter. You can find it here: http://svg2stl.com/
SVG to STL
The website is simple and does what it needs to do.
Start with uploading an SVG file. 
I tried uploading a JPG file. It was accepted however there were many artifacts shown. So that does not work.
An SVG file came out very well. So I converted it to an STL file.
It looked ok on the screen.
You can turn it in any direction you like for inspection just like the most STL viewers let you. After inspection just download it.
And here is the downloaded file in my slicer. And yes: for quick and dirty work I am using the creality slicer which is an old version of Cura but works just fine for most of my prints.
The slicer allows me to adjust the X, Y and Z dimension of anly loaded model so what I previous did in Tinkercad I can do now quicker.
JPG to STL direct ??
There are some websites that allow direct conversion from JPG to STL. I tried several of these and never got a good result. There is however another option to achieve this. That is for another upcoming story.
Till next time
have fun,
Luc Volders
