Sunday, August 14, 2022

Creating an unusual design in Silhouette

Someone at Two Peas needed help creating an unusual shape in the Silhouette software. They needed help figuring out to use the software to make a shape that looks like this:

Their problem was that they were trying to weld non-compound shapes, which cannot be welded. Below are the directions that I gave to create the above shape. They haven't responded since I posted, so they may have figured it out, but sometimes even as experienced as I am, I forget how to do certain things, and get frustrated when something doesn't weld, when I expect it to weld. In most, if not all instances, the problem is that it needs to be changed to a compound shape.

Create a single triangle. I chose the regular polygon, which automatically gave me five sides, but with a slider bar inside. I used the slider to reduce the sides to 3.

Offset the triangle. When I do this, the second triangle is rounded by default. (Sometimes I don’t want it rounded, so I would change this to the sharp corner option in the Offset command.)

Offset the rounded rectangle. Delete the pointy corner triangle which is now at the center.

Select the two rounded triangles and then “Make compound path.”

Create two thin rectangles, and turn them diagonally to match the angle of the left side of your triangle. Move the thin rectangle into your triangle and shorten it to just fit within the inside and outside lines of the double triangle. Duplicate the tilted rectangle, move it to the right of the first one, and shorten as needed. Once it looks the way you want, select all the shapes, then choose weld. That will give you the [above] shape.
 
I posted here to be able to show an image of the end result, but I am leaving this post here, in case I need a reminder later, or perhaps it helps someone else.


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