Dollhouse & furniture plans

[Adrian Hill]

I purchased the Lazerbuzz plans for a dollhouse & furniture. The plans are great and I've built a couple. I'd like to expand the range but I'm having a hard time finding plans in DXF form. Most of the plans are designed for scrollsaws and come in PDFs. Any help will be appreciated. We are also planning to make barns & stables and of course we have the same problem.

[Mark Ross]

You need a piece of software to convert it, google .pdf to .dxf converter there are plenty of software packages out there. You may want to check your graphics program or programs, it may already be a feature that is available and maybe just buried in an obscure pulldown menu. It can be done.

[Chuck Stone]

Corel will import PDF's and export to .dxf, won't it?

[Adrian Hill]

Importing PDF to Corel doesn't always work as planned. If the lines are drawn perfectly then you have a fair chance of getting the conversion right. When the lines are drawn using, say a wide pencil, then the conversion ends up being very jaggy. Cleaning up the jaggies takes up so much time that its better to import the JPG or PDF and redraw the vectors over the original drawing. I use Rhino4 3D to create the models. I am able to design the model "full size" in my chosen material thickness in 3D and then check that it all fits snugly together. I then lay the parts out flat and turn then into simple 2D lines. I modified the Lazerbuzz drawings drastically to get the look that I wanted. I am toying with the idea of designing the houses in a "plug n play" modular form. The design could be used like Lego blocks to build up a 3D model. That model can then be turned into various 2D models for cutting. Doing so would mean that creating a new dollhouse could be done very quickly.

Here are a couple of pictures of the houses that I have made. My daughters (10 &12) say that the pink one is too "girly" and the 12 year old wants me to build her a haunted house...(If I only had 10,000 arms & 10,000 hours in a day)

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[David Fairfield]

Cool. What's involved in laying a 3d shape flat, and reducing it to a vector line? Sounds interesting to me. Still unsure if I want to learn Rhino 3d.

Dave

[Larry Robinson]

Adrian,

Those are outstanding. You do very well with just two arms.

[Adrian Hill]

All the parts are rotated so that they layed down flat (just like you would do if you were to do it for real). Each part is then exploded so that you are able to get to the top surface of the layed down part. Rhino has a command to draw the border of the part. Once the border has been drawn you delete the 3D surfaces. It sounds very complicated but its not - Rhino has so many powerful controls that it is extremely easy to do. I do all my geometric drawing in Rhino and all my artistic drawing in Coreldraw. Rhino is designed for quick and easy geometric drawing (where geometric means a drawing that requires exact polygons) The 3D modeling comes in handy where you have a roof that pitches in the XX plane and the YY plane. By drawing it in 3D you can easily find the intersection points and work out where the cuts should be. It is also great to see where parts will interfere with one another during building. This can be done because you are able to explode the drawing and see how the parts come together. Oh of course, making an assembly plan is also a breeze because you simply use exploded views of the original 3D model. I personally think that Rhino is worth every cent and every minute spent learning it. 90% of my drawing is done in Rhino.

We manufacture model trains. The parts are cast in resin, lasercut etc. I use the same method to create assembly manuals. All the parts drawn for lasercutting & injection moulding are pulled in and the resin parts are then drawn. I include some examples. The left drawing shows parts that are cut on the laser. The right drawing shows some of those parts included in an partially completed exploded view of the tanker wagon to be used in the assembly manual.

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[Ben Levesque]

Adrian
Do you know if Rhino comes with a tool to unfold your 3D pieces into a flat surface? Or this specific unfolding option tool needs to be purchase in a 3dr party for Rhino?
Thanks
Ben

[David Fairfield]

Adrian, really nice exploded view drawing of the car. I guess I have the same or similar question as Ben (who also does beautiful miniature work). I assume from your previous post, its simple to take, for example, a single panel of a pitched roof and convert it to a flat plan view for laser cutting. That'd be pretty cool! I currently do the geometry on paper and then draw it in 2d on Adobe. Call me old fashioned :o

Dave

[Adrian Hill]

Rhino has many controls to work with surfaces. If the surface is flat you simply lay it on the correct plane and outline the surface using a boundry command. Rhino can unroll a surface that is curved in one plane. Rhino can also approximate a 3D surface that is curved in multiple planes (Like the surface of a football). The best is to constrain the drawings to developable surfaces to start with. What this means is that Rhino constrains the base geometry so that the surface could be unrolled in a single plane.

I alway lay out the surfaces flat myself. I also do most of my 2D drawing in Rhino because it has so many geometric commands. Here are a couple of pictures of a 1:87 scale post office building in progress. Note the roof pitch. Working out the intersection of that roof would have taken quite a bit of time by hand.

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[Michael Kowalczyk]

Hey Adrian,
Cool stuff. Do you print direct from Rhino or export a file for Corel Draw or other?
I am learning Rhino and Grasshopper and may try to send direct to our laser someday but then I will have to install Rhino on the Laser pc and I will probably have to upgrade the pc from an older :eek: Pentium III with XP pro (hey it is a dedicated PC for the laser and works great with only CDX3, Trotec Job Control, Lasertype 6 and 1000's of laser files on it) to newer one but I'll cross that bridge another day.

Thanks for sharing your pics. Could you also, if you don't mind, complete your signature showing what tools you have and where you are located. It helps all of us who help or need help.

Thanks again and ...