How to find the best laser cutting marketplace

Posted By Capucine Lonjon on Aug 30, 2016 | 0 comments

Are you excited about laser cutting possibilities and want to try for yourself? But you’re lacking skills and time to design your idea? This is not an issue anymore. Some designers and users are keen to share their 2D designs on marketplaces, and design generating platforms offer plenty of tips to create your design out of inspiration.

Marketplaces

Surprisingly, there are more marketplaces for 3D printing then for laser cutting. Nevertheless, we selected for you some platforms that do have some interesting designs.

• Thingiverse: if you type “tag 2D” on the research bar, you will find many designs available for free on this very well known marketplace.

• Epilog’s samples: this company which sells laser cutting machines offers a platform with original, diverse and beautiful designs. You can download 2D designs for free and do your own laser cutting.

• Rabbitlaserusa: you will find beautiful boxes for packagings and marketing presentations.

You must check the rights allocated to those designs to see what you can do after downloading a design. You can refer to our e-book dedicated to intellectual property.

Design generators & customization

•  Autodesk 1,2,3 / make: thanks to this application, you can turn 3D models into 2D build plans with animated assembly instructions. With their tutorials, you can easily choose the number of layers you want for your design and how to assemble all the laser cut plans.

•  Box Designer: enter the dimensions and thickness of your box online and the software will generate a PDF you can use to cut a notched box on a laser-cutter.

• Template Maker: the page contains a good number of templates for gift boxes and many other things that can be made out of paper. The templates are completely free and all dynamic: you can customize almost all dimensions.

• Gear Generator: this online tool creates involute spur gears that you can download in SVG format. In addition, it lets you compose full gear layouts with connected gears to design multiple gears system with control of the input/output ratio and rotation speed.

Get inspired from 2D designs platforms

2D designs platforms make available many designs that are not directly prepared for laser cutting. You can download and adapt them to the design guidelines recommended for laser cutting.

Design tips: check our tutorials

1/ Watch out for double lines

2/ Vectorize the texts

3/ Export in SVG., supported the best by our machines

4/ It is possible to convert a BITMAP into SVG. with Inkscape

5/ You can now upload your design on our platform

To check everything you must know on laser cutting, you can also download the latest e-book devoted to laser cutting. You will find all the history of lasers, how laser cutting arose, the materials Sculpteo offers and many tips.  

Enjoy laser cutting! Feel free to comment this article if you know other useful platforms.