Build a cookie cutter

Turn any shape into a cutter for dough, clay or fondant — traced from a model, or drawn by hand.

A cookie cutter is the outline of a shape and nothing else, which is why it is the one kitchen thing worth printing: you already have the shape.

Hand it a model and it traces the shadow. Not the model — its silhouette, seen from straight above. That is why a cutter costs nothing to make from a 200,000-triangle download that would defeat most other tools: flattening a shape onto a plane is one cheap operation, however much geometry goes into it. It also means what you get is the shape’s OUTLINE, so a figure with its arms out gives you a cutter with arms, and a figure with its arms folded gives you one without.

The size you set is the biscuit, not the cutter. The blade straddles the outline and the rim stands outside it, so a 70 mm cutter needs about 81 mm of plate at the shipped settings. Both numbers are in the panel, and the second is the one that has to fit.

A thin blade cuts and a thick one crushes — but too thin to print is not thin at all. Below the width your printer can lay down, the slicer quietly widens the wall back out to what it could manage, so you get the thick blade you were trying to avoid AND a part that may not stick to the plate. The Blade row measures against your own minimum wall for exactly this reason. 0.8 mm is two perimeters on a stock 0.4 mm nozzle and is the right answer almost always.

The rim is the handle. It is the part that keeps the heel of your hand off a 0.8 mm edge, and on stiff dough it is what stops the blade folding over instead of cutting. A bar across the opening would be a better grip and a worse cutter — it prints over thin air and it traps the dough behind it, so there is not one.

It is open at both ends, and that is deliberate. A cutter with a top is a stamp: the dough has nowhere to go and it sticks. Open, the shape pushes straight through and drops out when you lift it.

Interior detail is not cut. Only the outline is, because a cutter presses one closed curve through dough — the hole in a doughnut and the eye of a needle are not something a single pressing can produce. If the shape you traced has holes in its shadow, they are ignored and you get its outer boundary.

No model to trace? Draw one. Switch to the 2D view and look straight down first — you draw on a plane, and in the default tilted view you are seeing that plane at an angle, so a star that looks regular on screen comes out visibly lopsided. Then sketch an extrude profile: click around your outline, click the first point again to close it, press Enter. Feed that to the generator like anything else, or finish it by hand — set the Height to 18 mm, hollow it to a 1.2 mm wall, and switch on both Top and Bottom under open sides. That is the same part, built the long way, and it is worth doing once to see what the generator is doing for you.

Print it standing up. It already is: the generator emits it on its base, and stood up the blade is vertical the whole way round, with the cutting edge on the plate where it prints sharpest. Lying it on its side would arch the whole outline over thin air.

It arrives upside down, on purpose. The rim is on the PLATE and the cutting edge points up, which is the opposite of how you hold it — and it is the way it should print. Rim down, the first layer is the widest part of the whole cutter instead of a 0.8 mm ribbon holding up eighteen millimetres of wall, and nothing overhangs anything: 1550 square millimetres of bed contact against 202, and no supports against 11% of the surface needing them. It also lays the cutting edge down as the very last layer, at its true width, rather than squashing it into the bed. Turn it over when it comes off the printer.

Casting rather than baking? The casting mold generator takes the same model and wraps the whole of it instead of its shadow.

1. Click the shape you want to cut out — any body in your scene, or import an STL of one.
2. Open Generate in the left rail and pick Cookie cutter. It traces the shape’s outline and builds the blade around it.
3. Set Cut size to how big you want the biscuit. That is the shape, not the cutter — the blade and rim stand outside it, and the Printed size row tells you what actually lands on the plate.
4. Leave Cut depth at 18 mm for rolled dough, and check the Blade row is not warning you that it is thinner than your printer’s minimum wall.
5. Run the print check and export — no supports, no overhangs. It is generated rim-down, which is upside down from how you hold it and the right way up to print it.