Set up for printing, the tracer opens in Black and white at Smoothest, with the logo sample loaded. Black becomes solid, closed shapes; white, including the background, is left out. That is what an extrude needs: one flat profile per shape, holes where the letters and cut-outs are, and no box around the whole thing.
Making a printable shape
- Start from a bold, simple image. A silhouette, a logo or thick lettering prints well. Fine hairlines thinner than about two nozzle widths won’t survive.
- Check the preview for shapes that touch by a single pixel, which merge into one part, and for specks that would become tiny islands. Raise the threshold or clean the original if needed.
- Download SVG (or DXF in millimetres) and import it into your CAD program or slicer.
- Scale and extrude. A keychain tag might be 40 mm wide and 3 mm thick with a raised design of 1 mm on top; a wall sign more.
Common projects
- Name tags and keychains: extrude the shapes on top of a base plate, and add a hole for the ring in the CAD program.
- Cookie cutters: the outline of a silhouette, offset into a thin wall a few millimetres high.
- Stencils and signs: the shapes subtracted from a plate. A stencil needs bridges to hold the islands of letters such as A and O: tick Add bridges before downloading, as on the image to DXF page.
- Two-colour prints: trace each colour separately, or use the logo to SVG page, which traces several colours at once, and give each layer its own height.
Source
Autodesk Fusion help, “Insert SVG”, read in October 2026.