One of my relatives recently bought a Cricut Maker and I had the opportunity to play with it a little.

The Cricut Maker is a computer-controlled cutting machine for cutting small pieces of paper or fabric. Its small size makes it particularly suitable for hobbyists to create any type of small-scale production using paper, fabrics, leather and balsa wood.

In addition to the cutter, the Cricut Maker can also be equipped with pens or other tools

My idea behind this was to see how to plot Revit drawings with a “hand-draw” feel. I also wanted to create a small paper model from a pattern drawn from a Revit model.

I started by drawing a cube. I draw it in perspective manually in Autocad.

After various tests, I finally found the best way to import a design into the Cricut software. I start designing in AutoCAD where I am most skilled. There I create two layers, one for drawing and one for cutting. I then import the result into Adobe Illustrator.

In Illustrator, I ungroup each path and create a compound path for each layer.

Finally, I import this design as an SVG file into Cricut Design Space where I can send it to the machine.

The result is pretty good, with some of the hand sign feel I was looking for:

After this first test, I created a view in Revit and exported it to DWG. I then imported the DWG into Illustrator, created an SVG file, started Cricut, waited two hours …

..and have this beautiful “hand-drawn” survey:

I was also thinking of making a small paper model from a Revit model. I tried to plot and cut at the same time and get a nice cube (again) but didn’t go very far in that direction.

There are many options with this type of machine. I’ve only tried the standard pen and cutter, but the tools available allow many interesting combinations, like drawing and cutting paper models from a 3D building model.

I also love the “hand draw” feel I get with this plotter. My next productions with this machine will probably have more experience with different pens. I also need to find a way to remove the shadows from the Revit view.

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I just want to emphasize that I was neither paid by Cricut nor received the Cricut Maker in exchange for this blog post. I’m just adding liking this machine!