My 8 year daughter recently got her first pair of glasses and of our 3 kids is the most apt to lose or break em. With that I wanted to make something fun she could put them on when she wasn't wearing them. She really likes penguins so I modeled up a penguin in Fusion 360, sliced it in Make123D and cut it out on my X-Carve.

Step 1: Model Penguin in Fusion 360

I am a little bias as I work on the Fusion 360 team but the Sculpt environment is the bomb for things like this. I found an image of a toy penguin and used it as my background image and used it as reference to model up this penguin.

If you use Fusion 360 you can download the model from here.

Step 2: Slice and Dice

Once I had the model in a good state I exported an STL from Fusion 360 and imported it into 123D Make. In 123D Make, I rotated it as necessary, selected appropriate size of stock, specified "Stacked Slices" the set the dowel size to .25. From there I was able to export and EPS of all sheets.

Step 3: Convert EPS to SVG

Once I had all sheets exported as EPS files, I needed to convert them to SVGs for my CNC machine. I am a long time fan of iDraw then we purchased them and renamed as Autodesk Graphic. It was super easy open them and export them all as SVG files that could them be opened by my CNC software. You can also use tools like Illustrator or Inkscape to open the EPS and convert them to SVG files.

Step 4: Cut 'Em Out

As I mentioned in previous steps, I have an X-Carve from Inventables. They have a web base tool called Easel that lets you import SVG files and configure them to be cut out. I had 5 or 6 sheets I prepared and cut each of them out on my machine. Each sheet was out of a 12 x 12 birch plywood and took about 45 min to cut out with a .125 flat mill bit.