Most people who want to 3D print something simple give up at the CAD step. You know exactly what the part looks like. You could draw it in fifteen seconds on the back of an envelope. But turning that picture in your head into an STL means learning Fusion 360, and that is a weekend you do not have.
Here is the shortcut. Draw the shape on a sheet of paper. Photograph it. Export an STL. The tracer that normally cuts tool-shaped cavities into drawer inserts also works in reverse, extruding the traced outline into a solid object instead of a hole.
Cutout Mode vs Object Mode
Same trace, opposite result. In cutout mode the outline becomes a pocket removed from a tray. In object mode the outline becomes the object itself, extruded to whatever thickness you set. One traced shape, two completely different parts, and you switch between them with a dropdown.
That means anything you can draw becomes something you can print. A bracket. A spacer. A template. A cookie cutter profile. A replacement knob face. A name plate. A shim in a specific odd shape that no parametric generator will ever have a preset for.
Drawing So the Tracer Reads It Correctly
The detector looks for contrast between your line and the background, so a few habits make the difference between a clean trace and forty minutes of node editing.
- Use a thick black marker. A fine ballpoint on white paper is genuinely hard to see. A Sharpie is not. Thick, dark, and continuous beats precise and faint every time.
- Close every loop. A gap in the outline means the shape leaks and the trace runs off into the background. Look at your drawing and make sure the line actually returns to where it started.
- Fill it in if the shape is simple. A solid black silhouette traces more reliably than an outline, because the detector is not deciding whether the inside or the outside is the object.
- Keep interior holes clearly separated. If you want a bolt hole in your bracket, draw it as its own closed loop with clear white space around it. Holes touching the outer edge merge into the outline.
- Shoot straight down in even light. Angled shots skew the shape and hard side light throws a shadow that reads as part of the drawing.
Getting the Size Right Without Measuring Anything
A photo of a drawing has no inherent scale. A photo of a drawing on a sheet of Letter or A4 paper does, because the software knows a Letter sheet is 279.4 by 215.9 millimeters and works backward from there. Keep all four corners of the sheet in frame and the app corrects for camera angle and sets real dimensions on its own.
This is the part people underestimate. You are not eyeballing a scale factor and reprinting three times until it fits. Draw the bracket at the size you want the bracket, and the export comes out at that size. If you need the bolt spacing to be exact, print the calibration sheet and draw on that instead, which tightens the perspective correction further.
Try it without signing up: watch the tracer run on a sample in about ten seconds, then upload a drawing of your own and switch the output mode to 3D Object.
What This Is Good At
Flat things. Anything whose shape lives in two dimensions and just needs thickness is a perfect fit, because that is exactly what an extrusion is.
- Brackets and mounting plates. Draw the outline, mark the bolt holes, extrude to 4 or 5mm, print.
- Spacers and shims. Odd shapes that no catalog part matches.
- Templates and jigs. Drill guides, router templates, layout stencils.
- Cookie and clay cutters. Trace a drawing, extrude tall and thin, print in PETG.
- Signs and name plates. Hand-lettering traces surprisingly well when it is drawn thick.
- Replacement flat parts. A broken plastic tab, a cover plate, a battery door.
What It Is Not Good At
Being straight with you saves you a wasted afternoon. This is an extrusion tool, not a modeler.
Anything with real depth variation is out. Curved surfaces, domes, tapers, threads, parts that are thicker in the middle than at the edges. Those need actual CAD and there is no way around it. Fillets and chamfers are limited to what the bevel setting gives you on the top edge, which is fine for comfort and print quality but is not a design feature you control per-face.
Text smaller than about 8mm tall tends to lose detail in the trace. Very thin drawn lines, under roughly 2mm at real scale, can come out fragile or break up entirely. And if your part needs to mate precisely with something you cannot lay flat on paper, you are back to calipers regardless.
Print Settings for Extruded Parts
Flat extrusions print about as easily as anything gets, since they sit on the bed with a large first layer and no overhangs. A few notes anyway.
For brackets and anything structural, PETG at 0.2mm layers with 4 perimeters and 40 percent infill holds up well. Perimeters matter more than infill on flat parts because most of the strength is in the walls. For templates and jigs, PLA is fine and cheaper. For cutters, PETG again, since PLA gets brittle and food contact wants something less prone to microcracking.
Orientation is usually obvious: lay it flat. The exception is when the part will take a load that would peel the layers apart, in which case printing it on edge trades bed adhesion for layer alignment in the direction that matters.
The First Print Will Probably Be Slightly Off
Not because the trace is wrong. Because your drawing was. A hand-drawn line has thickness, and where exactly the outline falls within that thickness is a judgment call the software makes for you. Expect the first part to be within a millimeter or so and plan on one iteration.
The fix is fast: nudge the offset setting a fraction in whichever direction, re-export, reprint. Or edit the nodes directly if one specific area came out wrong. Two minutes, not another CAD tutorial.
Why This Beats Learning CAD for Simple Parts
CAD is the right answer for complicated parts and it always will be. But a huge share of what people actually want to print is flat, simple, and dimensionally forgiving. For those, the drawing already exists in your head, and the fastest path from your head to a printed part runs through a marker and a phone camera, not through a parametric feature tree.
Everything traces the same way whether it is a wrench, a gasket, or a bracket you invented ten seconds ago. The drawing is just another silhouette.