Text on plastic using Sketchup (yeah, I know, don’t use sketchup)
I’m making cake toppers for the boy’s birthday, my L33t CADCAM skills have a model in sketchup, sliced and printed, but the letters don’t seem to be attached to the plane they snap to. Any thoughts on getting them to ‘stick’?
Personally, I think the “floating” letters effect is cool.
It may be cool, but it’s not very strong. There was also supposed to be a nice ridge around the perimeter (i wanted to float a layer of paint for contrast), and it’s all stringy.
I cant tell how its laid out here but from an engineering point of view the letters should be sitting on a thin flat plate of 1mm or so which is then floating above the base with a few connections to it. would be more stable.
When attaching the letters to the base in sketchup the best way is to extrude the face of the letters into the other part and then use the outer shell tool. That removes all the interior structures and creates a single shell. You should also be using tye solid inspector plugin if not already.
There is also another tool that lets you curve any object that works great for text but I cant remember right now what it is. Ill post it up when I get home tonight.
For the love of God, don’t use sketchup. It’s so bad at CAD.
It’s the only til i have that’ll last text on a model (before tomorrows bday party)
I’ll immediately return to inventor fusion after this. 
I find Sketchup to be a great 3d digital design tool
Just an idea… If you get it to slice well you should do a color swap for the last 5-10 layers.
If you understand its limitations and arent going for dimensional accuracy it works good enough. I use it a lot just because it’s what I started with. Learning solidwirks for mechanical stuff now.
