Advanced: Sizing and Adjusting Shapes
Want to level-up your 3D food printing with Foodini? Sometimes your shapes may need to be adjusted to get to the final print result you desire. A lot depends on the actual ingredient you are printing and the nozzle size.
Ingredients may spread after printing, even ever so slightly, which may affect the print result. Or perhaps based on the nozzle size you are using, the shape needs to be sized differently or even slightly redesigned. Or maybe you can use a smaller nozzle - depending on the ingredient, of course.
If your initial shape doesn't produce the results you want, try scaling the image up or down, or do some adjustments to the image itself. We give you permission to play with your food! 😀
And of course once you perfect your print, you can save it and lock it to print again whenever you want.
Example 1: Scaling Text
We created this Happy Anniversary text print in Foodini Creator using the 1 line width script lettering feature. We use a 1.5 nozzle for all of these prints, and printed with icing. We simply scaled the image up and down to create these three examples of different sized text:
The first print is very readable. All is good!
We can decrease the size of the print, as seen in the second image - the text is still readable.
However, in the third image, the readability starts to decrease. The print size is a bit too small for this ingredient and nozzle size.
Example 2: Distorting the Original Image to Achieve Desired Results
We printed this dragon image using real chocolate. It needed to be a small print because it's a cupcake topper, so we used a 0.8 nozzle. We had to adjust the image to achieve the small size and detail we wanted.
The adjusted image is exaggerated in some parts, and slimed down in others. That's because we know that the chocolate would spread a bit as it printed. So we made image adjustments to account for spreading.
Of course, some of this knowledge comes with experience in printing, so we wouldn't advise doing something like the dragon as a first print. The dragon is more advanced.
Example 3: Using a Template to Assist in Scaling Prints
Sometimes you can take an entire image with multiple elements and print it. Other times, breaking the image into individual pieces gives you more control over print results.
Here we'll show you how to work with images that are broken up into individual shapes. And we'll use templates to help line up the shapes in Foodini Creator.