Logo to STL — a raster logo traced into clean 3D outlines
This page opens on the logo preset: your artwork is thresholded, traced into real vector contours and extruded 3 mm as a free-standing cut-out, 60 mm across, with no base plate underneath. The counters of an “O” or an “A” stay open, because the tracer finds holes as well as outlines.
Model
Traces the outline of a logo, icon or text and extrudes it — crisp edges, small files.
Tracing
Nothing showing? Drag Threshold — it decides which pixels count as solid — or switch Invert.
Base & mounting
Without a base the traced shapes are cut out on their own.
Tips
- Logos and icons trace best from high-contrast black-on-white artwork — drag Threshold until the preview matches the shape you want.
- Photos belong in Relief mode; tracing a photo produces confetti, not a model.
- Keychains: keep the artwork at least 1.5 mm thick and the tag 2–3 mm so the ring hole doesn’t tear.
- Stamps must be mirrored — the preset does it — and print best with the relief 2–3 mm proud of the base.
- Print flat on the bed; a raised logo on a plate needs no supports.
Capabilities
What the tracer gives you
- Marching-squares contour tracing rather than a voxel grid — edges come out as continuous curves, not a staircase of pixel corners.
- Enclosed regions are detected as holes, so letterforms, ring marks and cut-out symbols keep the gaps the designer drew.
- The speck filter starts high on this page, because antialiased and JPEG-compressed logos shed crumbs of stray pixels around every edge.
- A smoothing slider that relaxes the contour without rounding off deliberate corners, so a chevron stays a chevron.
- Export the same traced outline as a true-millimetre SVG for a laser cutter, a vinyl plotter or back into CAD.
- Free-standing by default with no backing plate; switch a base on in one click if the mark needs something to sit on.
Process
How it works
- Start from the biggest file you haveA 1000 px or larger PNG traces cleanly; a logo lifted from a web page at 200 px carries compression noise into every edge.
- Set the thresholdDrag Threshold until the preview matches the mark exactly, and flip Invert if the logo is light on a dark field. This one slider does most of the work.
- Extrude and exportChoose the width and extrude height, then take the STL for printing or the SVG for cutting. Print it flat — a cut-out needs no supports.
Clean edges
Threshold, invert and specks — getting vector-quality edges from a raster
A raster logo has no edges, only pixels that get progressively lighter towards one. Threshold is where you declare the boundary: at 50% the trace follows the midpoint of the antialiased fringe, which is usually right, but a scan or a screenshot with a grey cast may want 40% or 65%. Watch the shape rather than the number. Invert matters whenever the mark is lighter than its background — without it you trace the background and get a rectangle with a logo-shaped hole. Specks are the third control: compression leaves isolated pixels that cross the threshold in flat areas, and each one becomes a tiny island in the mesh. Raise “Ignore specks” until they vanish and stop there, because the same filter will happily eat a dot over an “i”. Smoothing goes last, in small steps — it relaxes contour jitter, and pushed hard it will start shaving corners.
Source files
When to trace a logo and when to use the vector instead
If you have the original SVG, EPS or AI file, tracing a PNG of it is throwing away the geometry you already own — send the vector through the SVG-to-3D tool and get mathematically exact curves. Tracing is the right answer when the vector is gone: a logo from a website, a scanned letterhead, a client’s emailed JPEG, a stencil photographed off a wall. One thing to plan for either way is stroke width. A logo that looks confident on a business card can have strokes under a millimetre when printed at 60 mm, and anything below roughly 1.2 mm is two perimeters of a 0.4 mm nozzle with nothing between them — fragile as a cut-out, and prone to snapping when you pop it off the bed. Either scale the model up or pick the version of the mark with heavier weight.
Notes
Good to know
- Tracing reads one threshold, so a multi-colour logo collapses to a single silhouette; separate the colours into their own images if you want distinct parts.
- Gradients and drop shadows do not survive a threshold — flatten them to solid shapes in an editor before tracing.
- Fine texture, halftone screens and heavy JPEG artefacts trace into dozens of islands even with the speck filter raised.
- The extrusion has straight vertical walls; chamfers, embossed bevels and rounded faces need a mesh editor afterwards.
FAQ
Questions, answered
How do I convert a logo to STL?
Drop the logo image on this page. It is traced and extruded straight away at 60 mm wide and 3 mm tall — set the threshold so the preview matches your mark, adjust the size, and download the STL.
Will the holes in my letters stay open?
Yes. The tracer identifies enclosed regions as holes and triangulates around them, so counters in letters and gaps inside symbols come through as real openings in the solid.
My logo is a JPEG — will it trace well?
It will, with a caveat: JPEG compression softens edges and scatters stray pixels, so raise the speck filter and expect to work the threshold harder than you would with a clean PNG.
Can I get an SVG instead of a 3D model?
Yes. The SVG outline button exports the same traced contours at true millimetre scale, sized to whatever width you set, ready for a laser cutter or a vinyl plotter.
How thick should a printed logo be?
Three millimetres is a solid free-standing cut-out at 60 mm wide. Go thicker for anything larger or anything with thin arms, and check no stroke of the mark falls below about 1.2 mm at the size you have chosen.
Is the logo uploaded anywhere?
Never. The trace runs on your machine, which matters when the mark belongs to a client and has not been announced yet.
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