Converting an EPS file to a 3D Printable (or millable) Design!

I found this technique around August of 2013 or so. I used it to create some trophies for my agency's "Make-a-thon" with the company logo on top. I haven't needed to use it again until today, but now that I need it again I figured I should record the steps on a blog for easy reference in the future.

It's an easy process that has only a few (free) tools required. I am doing all of this on Mac OS X but it could easily be done on Linux or another OS.

Requirements:
pstoedit (brew install pstoedit)
Rhino/other 3D tool to extrude the paths

Steps:

1. use pstoedit to convert your .eps file to a .dxf

pstoedit -dt -f dxf:-polyaslines infile.eps outfile.dxf

2. open the .dxf file in Rhino or another editor. You'll see that it has all the paths drawn on the x/y plane, we need to combine and extrude these paths. First scale these 2D paths to be the size you want to print or mill. I set mine to be 8 centimeters wide. Because the paths are vectors it should scale nicely. Next select all the paths and do a linear extrude on them. At this point you will be forced to do some manual editing, or something very tricky. First cap any letter hulls you just created, then you'll need to take any negative areas like inside of letter loops, and cap them. Then do a boolean difference on them from the letter hulls. You could probably use a script to do something clever here to automate this, but if you only have a few letters like I did, it may not be worth your time over manually doing it. At this point you should have your 3D extruded text ready for printing or milling. You can do booleans on it with other shapes if you need a negative shape or whatever!

Credits:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Other_2D_formats