This 3D model was designed to facilitate the creation of personalized name keychains for kids attending my daughter's birthday party. Designed using OpenSCAD, this model allows you to generate name keychains/tags with one or two lines of text. The chosen font, Pacifico by Vernon Adams, adds a playful touch to the tags and can be easily swapped out for other system or external fonts as desired.
Available STLs All names used to generate the available STLs were generated by ChatGPT and should correspond to the top 100 most popular names from some of the closest countries to me including Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the UK.
Multi-Color Printing For someone without a multi-color 3D printer, like me, printing with multiple colors is still easy and achievable. One can manually pause the print and change the filament or automate the process using the slicer. Some slicers might not have this option available, so you might want to give a try to one of the best out there, OrcaSlicer. There are several tutorials readily available on platforms like YouTube.
Included Sources The .scad source file is included along with it's dependencies, such as the name lists, default font and a bash script with instructions for generating STL files in batch mode.
OpenSCAD Customization Options
First Word/Last word: text to be rendered.
First Word/Last word offset: shift the text left or right in relation to the chain link.
Font Size: Easily adjust the size to change the text proportions.
Font Name: Use another system font, or import one in the same way as the default Pacifico font.
Words Spacing: Adjust the spacing between words for optimal visual appeal.
Base Text Padding/Height, Text Contour Padding/Height: Fine-tune the padding and height of the base text and text contour layers to suit your taste.
Include Chain Link: enable or disable the chain link rendering.
Bore Size: Adjust the chain link bore size.
Chain Link Lenth: Increase or decrease the chain link length.
Preview Customization: Each text layer's color can be customized for previewing purposes without affecting the exported STL files. This feature allows you to visualize the appearance of the name tags before exporting.
OpenScad Instructions
All source files are located inside the .zip file, under the Other files section at the bottom of Printables files tab. You might need to scroll down a bit to get to them.
Make sure to unzip the source files keeping the original file structure. In order to correctly open and render the original model, the fonts folder and words_key_chain.scad file must be in the same path.
After opening the .scad file and performing your customization, first click in the renderbutton. Note that each time you change a single parameter, you'll need to perform a new render before exporting to STL.
After the render has finished (which should take between 1 and 3 minutes, or even more, depending on the complexity of the words), click in the STL export button.
Some font characters might render slightly shifted to the right due to the way the font was designed (One example is the letter “J”). In case the chain link does not fully link to the text, just play with the first_word_offset and chain_link_length values.
Extra Files
Groentebroer performed some mods to the original files in order to generate more layers (example above) and also generated STLs for the most common names in Netherlands. You can find all this files at the bottom of the files tab named Groentebroer.zip.
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