2D/3D CAD
3D:
This week I worked through a few tutorials with openSCAD trying to familiarize myself with the environment. Learning about making spheres, cubes, cylinders, "translating" objects, rotating objects, scaling, difference, intersection and union. For my design I stuck with a few simple cylinders using the difference function (as well as various translations/rotations of the cylinderss). I went with the ceramics class favorite, an ashtray. 
Glorious, I know. Heres the "code" I wrote in openSCAD:
difference()
{
cylinder(5,15,15);
translate([0,0,2]) cylinder(5,14,14);
translate([0,30,5]) rotate([90,0,0]) cylinder(60,1,1);
translate([-30,0,5]) rotate([0,90,0]) cylinder(60,1,1);
translate([-20,20,5]) rotate([45,90,0]) cylinder(60,1,1);
translate([-30,-30,5]) rotate([-45,90,0]) cylinder(60,1,1);
}
2D:
After some browsing on google images I came across a pencil drawing of Vic Rattlehead, the mascot for the thrash metal band Megadeth. I thought it would make an awesome sticker so I imported it into inkscape to make a vector out of it. After tracing the bitmap I found that it created a vector of my image. However, it used over 10,000 nodes to do so, there were tons of tiny little paths right next to eachother and I knew if I planned on making a vinyl sticker out of it (which I did) I had some cleaning up to do.
After going in and deleting all of the excessive nodes and getting rid of a lot of the smaller paths I found the simplify path tool in inkscape. Too late. Here is how my final image came out.
