Stackable Coffee Coasters

In further exploring the capabilities of rhino3D, I attempted to create stackable coffee coasters where the design printed on each coaster would come together to form the final image when stacked. I found the coffee coasters above on Pinterest and really loved the concept of the coasters creating an image and wanted to replicate it in my own coasters.

As these coasters will be for my own use, I wanted the final design on them to be something I love, so I decided to use an image from one of my favorite animated movies Spirited Away from Studio Ghibli. All image credit goes to imedho. I wanted to use an image that did not have too many details so that it could be easily split into layers and the details will not be lost in printing. I then split the image into three parts.

After splitting the images into three layers, I put a border on each of them to shape the coaster. The pieces have a lot of free floating parts, so I took a parametric design and integrated it into each image. This solved the issue of the free floating parts as well as provided a nice background to all the pieces that would additionally work as support for the coasters. I then set all of them as a single color so that the difference in colors could be read by rhino3d and then followed this tutorial to create 3d models from the images.

It crashed. It crashed many times. I tried following the Grasshopper tutorial, but I could not get it working past the bounds component. Time to come up with a new way to get these images into Rhino3d!

So after many, many, many hours of research and testing, I found a new way to get the images in Rhino3d in a way that I could create 3d models from them. And that approach was taking the rasterize images and creating them into vector images. To do this, I took the images into Adobe Illustrator and used the Image Trace function that traces the image and creates a vector version of it. Once I had all three vector images, it was time to put them back into Rhino3 and create them into 3d.

In Rhino3d, I imported the images as eps and placed them on top of a four by four inch square slab. I then used the MakeHole function to cut out the image into the square. Why didn't I extrude the image to make it three dimensional? I tried that but Cura yelled at me a lot saying there were a lot of edges that it did not like. Once I had cut the image into the square, I put the square into another square I made so it had a border. The border is 1mm taller than the square because I want to put glass in the coasters so that it protects the base. Once that was done, I exported the model into Cura.

I put the stl model into Cura, but saw that it was too small. To fix this, I did what the professor told us to not do. I scaled it. I changed the model to be 101 x 101 x 3mm. This would make it a four by four inch coaster.`When I sliced the first piece the first time, I saw that some of the finer details were lost. This include the parametric design which is an essential part of the coasters. I took the images back into Adobe Illustrator to make the lines thicker and did the process again with Rhino3d. It worked! Cura could now read all of the parts of the models and print them.

It took a couple tests and a couple times exploring the Cura settings to get the coasters printed. On the first print, the printer was moving too fast for the smaller lines to cool off so they would move with the printer. I went into Cura and changed the speed to be 10.00mmps, which leads to a time of about 8 hours to print, but this was needed to print out the base. Once the base was printed, I increased the speed on Ender Pro 3 to 428%, which is 42.80mmps. This shortened the time to three hours.

And here they are! They look great and I can't wait to get the glass so I can put it over the three dimensional images!