Use your 3D Printer as a plotter / vinyl cutter. If you've already got a 3D Printer, you shouldn't need to buy a separate Cricut or Silhouette machine.
Polycut is a tool designed to import SVG files and convert them to 2D GCode to run on 3D Printers, CNCs or any other Gcode machines that have blades/pens/knives/foil tools attached. It also directly supports uploading to a networked 3D Printer via Moonraker/Klipper.
- Import multiple SVGs, arrange and scale them on the canvas
- SVG groups / layers are preserved on import, including clipped geometries
- While I strongly recommend using
Inkscapeto design your SVGs exactly as you want and then use Polycut as a machine path generator, basic transformation support is available in Polycut.- Copy/Cut/Paste support
- Boolean operations (Union, Subtract, Intersect, Exclude)
- Mirror/Flip objects (handy for using heat-transfer vinyl)
- Editing Stroke/Fill colour
- Resize/rotate/move
- Basic shapes (line, ellipse, rectangle, path) can be drawn directly on the canvas
- Cutting mode - Generates optimised outline paths for a drag knife or cutter (e.g. Roland Vinyl Cutter, or cricut/silhouette blades).
- Configurable swivel offsets that account for the blade diameter to ensure sharp corners remain sharp
- Tracks the blade orientation when moving between cut lines to optimise and avoid tearing / scratching
- Drawing mode - generate paths and fills using a variety of fill patterns:
- Hatch, Crosshatch, Spiral, Triangular Hatch, Diamond Crosshatch, and Radial fills
- Multipass — repeat cutting or drawing passes N times, stepping down in Z between each pass; useful for thicker materials that need multiple light passes rather than a single deep cut
- Foiling / Engraving / Embossing / Etching - Each can easily be done using configurable settings of the above modes
- Save and reload working projects to/from disk, preserving all canvas shapes and properties.
- Allows exporting the canvas to SVG as well
- Add and manage multiple printers (or any GCode supporting machine really) with independent profiles
- Per-printer Custom Start / End GCode
- Per-printer Tool X / Y Offsets to compensate for toolhead mounting offsets
- Klipper bounding box preview - Send a dry-run rectangle pass to the Klipper before actually cutting, so you can confirm the material is aligned properly before actually cutting/drawing
- A full 2D animated render of toolpaths including travel/active line discrimination, showing the order processing will occur
- Detailed controls for Pause, Resume, Step Forward, Step Back in the preview animation
- GCode preview shows estimated time and total drawing/cutting length (also exported to Klipper if you use it)
- Save to GCode file, or
- Send to a networked 3D printer using Klipper/Moonraker
- Option to auto-start running the file after upload
- Klipper Bounding Box Preview export — runs a travel-only rectangle so you can verify alignment before committing to a cut
- Simply takes the provided URL from the export tab and renders the webpage; handy for monitoring Klipper from within the app rather than opening a separate browser
There are two generators currently included with Polycut; Polycut.Core and GCodePlot
- Polycut.Core: Created for Polycut from the ground up, and incorporates a lot of performance and quality tweaks.
- GCodePlot: Created by @arpruss, with a few tweaks by myself that haven't made it into the base repository yet. This is a more tried-and-tested generator with more consistent results; initially this was a superior processor, but over the past few months
Polycut.Corehas become a lot more capable with more supported features. GCodePlot remains for those who simply prefer it :)- Note: GCodePlot doesn't support the spiral/radial/diamond/triangle fill patterns. It also cannot process SVG text elements or clipped paths directly.
- Windows 10 v1809 or higher (Windows 11 required for Mica effects).
- Technically it could work as far back as Windows 7 but I haven't tested it.
I have a 3D printer. I wanted to get into bookbinding, which utilises a lot of vinyl designs that typically require a Cricut, Silhouette or similar vinyl cutter that costs as much as a 3D printer. A 3D printer is already a perfectly good 3-axis system, capable of <200 micron cutting/drawing precision. General solutions do exist for creating GCode from SVG files already - You can convert SVGs to GCode from within Cura, but it doesn't account for the diameter of a swivel blade, and thus corners are never crisp; Inkscape has its own inbuilt GCodeTools but it is extremely kludgy; InkCut looks to be nice, but it refuses to run on my PC.
GCodePlot by @arpruss is an excellent extension to Inkscape - by far the best I found (and in fact, you can use it from within Polycut) but on its own, it isn't quite smooth enough. You have to chop up a 12" cutting mat to fit on a standard 3d printer bed, and you never quite know where to line everything up. First I created a template for Inkscape that had a pre-chopped cutting mat in it. Then modified GCodePlot to allow exporting from Inkscape's export menu, added support for ignoring hidden/locked layers, and added Moonraker upload support. That should have been enough for me.
But then I got ambitious...
If you have an Ender 3 S1 or other printer that can take this hotswap mount, then you can get my current vinyl cutter holder here.
Otherwise, you'll find vinyl cutters on Printables/Thingiverse. I strongly recommend using one that has a spring in it, because a 3D printer bed is nowhere near level enough for the accuracy needed to consistently cut through vinyl. A spring will allow a bit of flexibility and pressure to keep the blade in contact with the cutting mat.
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