50 States, 50 Ornaments

50 State ornaments! Couple with red, white, and blue tinsel for a patriotic Christmas tree!

One of my first projects in 3D was to trace out an outline of Delaware and add a star for Dover. This would have been time-consuming to do for all 50 states, but fortunately, I found all 50 states with the capitols marked from 50states.com.

From there, I created a Gimp file with a layer containing the oval that would ultimately frame the ornament (a 4x5 oval, done as 2400x3000 pixels to keep everything high quality at the start of the process) and a text layer to define the maximum amount of space I would need for the name (i.e., the Carolinas). I ended up moving this up to give a better fit for states with shorter names.

I added each state map as a layer in GIMP, filled in the outline, paying attention to islands, etc., and left a mark to indicate the capitol. You can see the remnants of 50states' star in the Arkansas image above. For the next step, I needed a solid fill inside the image, with a mark large enough to be reflected in the svg file but small enough to be filled and covered by the star I would end up creating in Tinkercad. From GIMP, I generated 50 pngs, changing the state that was visible and the content of the text layer between each one.

I used image.online-convert.com to convert the pngs to svgs, preparing for importation into Tinkercad.

Once all 50 svgs were prepared, I brought the first into Tinkercad. I worked with the dimensions of the state, the capitol, the background, and the ornament itself, ultimately settling on a 3mm height for the base, 6mm for the state, and 8mm for the frame and the star. Once the background (bottom piece), the frame, and the star were set, I imported each state's svg, scaled them to match the size of the frame, and exported their stls.