A box from your own drawing: importing an SVG outline

The catalog has 100 shapes. Your shop logo, your dog, the outline of your home state or the mascot of the team you are making a gift for are not among them, and now they do not have to be: upload an SVG with one closed outline and the Studio builds the same living-hinge box around it that it builds around a catalog shape. This guide covers how to prepare the file, what the engine does to your lines and why, and how to read the notes it gives back.

What the file needs

• One closed path. The box takes the largest closed path in the file as its outline. Everything else is ignored and the Studio tells you so: inner paths and holes, separate shapes, open lines, text. If your logo is several shapes, union them into one first (Path → Union in Inkscape, Pathfinder → Unite in Illustrator).
• No text. Letters cannot be read from the file. If the text is part of the shape, convert it to outlines (Object to Path / Create Outlines) and union it with the rest.
• No strokes as the shape. A thick stroke looks like a shape on screen but the path underneath is a thin line. Use Stroke to Path first if the stroke is what you mean.
• Simple outline. A path that crosses itself is refused, with the position of the crossing. Traced bitmaps sometimes do this at sharp corners; simplify the path or redraw that corner.
• Millimetres, if you want the size read. A document whose width and height are in mm, cm or inches sets the box size from the drawing. A file in pixels or without units is treated as a shape: it keeps your current size and you set the width and length yourself.

Paths, polygons, rectangles, circles and ellipses are all read, through any transform on them or their groups, so a drawing moved or rotated on the page comes in as it appears.

How big the features have to be

The wall of a Hingesmith box is a strip of plywood that wraps the outline, sitting one plate lip plus one thickness inside it. A living hinge has a tightest bend it can take, so the plate's corners end up with a minimum radius, and the wall has to fit inside every lobe or arm of the shape. In numbers:

The catalog shapes follow one rule at their suggested size: every feature at least 34 mm wide and every curve of 17 mm radius or more. Hold your drawing to the same rule at the size you will cut and it builds cleanly on 3 and 4 mm stock. For 6 mm stock, make the box about 1.6 times larger, as the catalog does. A tulip's stem or a cat's ear thinner than that is not a defect in the drawing; it is just a feature the wall cannot get into, and the Studio will say so.

What the Studio does with your lines

1. Flattens the curves into points, fine enough that no segment shows on the cut, and keeps at most 2,000 points. Very detailed traces are resampled evenly along the outline.
2. Takes the largest closed path, drops the rest with a note, and makes the outline run counter-clockwise, which is how the engine lays out tabs and hinge cuts.
3. Rounds every corner tighter than the stock allows, exactly as it does for the catalog: a true tangent arc of the limit radius replaces the corner, so the wall's centre line never bends tighter than R8, R10 or R15. Inward corners get a slightly softer minimum than the wall strictly needs, because a notch in a logo is usually drawn sharp.
4. Fits the result to exactly width × length. The two sliders are independent, so you can stretch the shape as well as scale it. The upload sets them to the drawing's proportions.
5. Builds the box: base and rim plates with tab slots, the hinged wall split where it has to be, the lid with a border or the lid motif you choose, nested on your sheet. Everything the hinge engine does for a catalog shape it does here.

Reading the design notes

• “Tightest wall bend is R…” A corner could not take the full fillet because the feature around it is too small. Make the box larger, use thinner stock, or widen that feature in the drawing.
• “Part of this outline is narrower than the wall can follow” A neck or lobe is thinner than twice the lip plus the wall (12 mm on 3 mm stock, 16 on 4 mm, 24 on 6 mm), so the wall skips it: you would get a plate with a tab that has no wall behind it. Widen that part or scale the box up.
• “…needs x% of the twist the hinge can give” The chosen hinge pattern cannot take a bend this tight. Try Serpentine or a pattern with longer cuts, or enlarge the box.
• “Box is too small for a rim opening” The lid insert has no room inside the wall. Scale up.

Check the fold in 3D before you cut: a wall that looks right wrapped around the base is a wall that will fit. Then cut the free bend test from the same sheet if you have not already, because an outline with tight corners asks more of the plywood than a rounded box does.

Exporting and sharing

Previewing your outline folded is free. Exporting the cut file is part of Pro, like the Pro shapes and hinges; the export carries the same kerf compensation and layers as every other Hingesmith file (see importing into LightBurn and xTool Creative Space). A Share link carries the size, hinge and lid but not the outline, which is too large for a URL: send the SVG along with it.