quick way to design and print names onto objects

[swoop_ds]

I am running a men's retreat in the new year and one of the things that will be occuring is a demo of 3d printing - (assuming I can get my printer by then and have it all running well..)

I'm throwing around different ideas about stuff that could be printed during the event to have as giveaways. One of the things that I'm thinking about is a duct tape dispenser or some sort of other manly nick nack with the winners name on it. So the idea would be to hold a contest Friday night or early Saturday morning and then have the printer work away on the project all throughout the weekend. Sunday before everyone leaves, we would present the prize to the winner. During the weekend, people would be able to walk by and have a look at the printers progress.

There are some hurdles that I need to overcome (namely getting a printer that works and is 'dialed in') but one thing I'm having a bit of trouble with is how to insert text onto objects in a quick and easy manner. I only have rudimentary 3d modelling abilities and only have access to free programs (Blender for instance). There wouldn't happen to be a simple way to do this would there? I can currently do it, but it takes me awhile and a lot of monkeying around...

Thanks!
-Dave

[curious aardvark]

produce the text as a seperate stl file and combine the two in the slicing software.
Print both files with the same head and Bob's your mother's brother :-)

[Davo]

http://www.3DTin.com will let you do 10 characters and save the .stl locally, and Fanny's your father's sister.

[3DPBuser]

Could always just elevate the text, and then pause the extruder to change filament color where the text starts.

[Bassna]

www.tinkercad.com is also useful for doing this. I use that in combination with Photoshop, making the text in there, 3D extrusion, and import it into tinkercad for moving onto my object

[ralphzoontjens]

A somewhat professional solution could be to export all characters of the text separately, as well as the object's file(s), then create a script in OpenSCAD that lets you combine the object's STL file with the text STL's, based on which text you input. You can also program scaling depending on which characters are used. Then even I think it should be possible to put the script on Thingiverse.