Here is a little weekend project I made called Wire Letters. It was originally conceived as a sculpture project to make a 3-dimensional font using coat hanger wire (hence the name) and each letterform made from one piece of continuous wire. The idea being to create it so that it only looks like the letterform from a certain angle and otherwise look like a mess of wire. I think of it as a puzzle where you would be presented with a shape of wire and then you would have to figure out what letter it is.

Not looking forward to a day with coat hangers and wire cutters, I realised Processing would be ideal to make this and hopefully produce many options for export and reuse. I would like to get them printed using a 3D printer (i have previously written a little DXF file writer which I could repurpose) and I have another version which exports images of the letterforms rotated in 15° increments.

It would be great to hear any thoughts and suggestions for other export ideas like other 3D formats from DXF as I don't know much about 3D, or if it could be turned into a real font as a postscript, truetype, opentype, plus any ideas for re-use or extension.

There are a bunch of controls I forgot to write on the html page:

space to start/stop auto-rotation

0 to reset rotation

delete to regenerate letters

arrows to increment rotation in 15° steps

drag mouse for free rotation

Thanks for having a look!