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I’m try to create a negative silicone mold and Easel doesn’t seem to be centering the items correctly. I’m still learning Easel so I’m not sure about if there is something I’m missing.
Is the first item selected or the last (same as Inkscape) is what the reference to be centered on? When I created the SVG file in Inkscape
everything was centered correctly.
I selected all of the items and then centered them Easel shows its centered in the picture. If you look at the picture, the top of the star handle is bigger gap from the edge. The bottom of the star is closer to the edge. The two circles in the middle are not centered correctly. When you rotate the star the two circles will move back and forth every time you rotate the star. I’m not able to find anything to help me fix this issue.
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I think the easiest way to perfectly center that radiused 5 point star object using Easel would involve geometry, using the node points of the shape and plot them to find how much to manually move the object to make it centered. This would involve geometry, polygons, and some math… too much for me on a Wednesday morning…
However you could get very close by creating a circle that is very close to the outermost edges of the shape and then manually adjusting until it’s very very close to centered…
However when performing the faster, less accurate method I discovered that your star like shape is a-symmetrical with 2 of the 5 arms being shorter than the other 3. And then by rotating it along 72 degrees, I also noticed that the shape also has varied radiuses throughout… and that makes centering in this quick and dirty method even less accurate… BUT this is what I got by doing it with my manual method of adding a circle approximately the same size at the star tips, manually moving it to just touch the tips (making the star and my new circle concentric) and then changing the circle to be much larger than the star, then selecting both and centering to material… (and centering the rest of your circles to material as well…
As @SethCNC said, your star shape is not regular.
You don’t want to use that version for a knob.
You mentioned that you use inkscape? Can you do the design there? It’ll be pretty straightforward to redo the star and center it on it’s center of rotation (which is different than the center of the bounding box).
I know @SethCNC gave you a good version, but I just looked at this in Inkscape with a fresh, regular star.
Original on the Left, my new version on the right.
I went back to Inkscape and looked at everything I found several of my mistakes that I made. Im not profiencient in Inkscape but I’m learning both. Thanks for your help will let you know how it goes later.
Hope you were successful. I’m about to start a mold project myself. May I ask if you treated the plywood before pouring the silicone? And have you tried using other materials to carve? Thanks!
