How to make a ring with text on the outside using a 3D printer.
You need to create a long image with the text in it using your favorite image/graphics program. Adobe PhotoShop will do but it is overkill for what you need to do. Microsoft Paint is fine, or any one of many free paint programs available. Start of with a white canvas about 1000 pixels wide by 100 pixels high, so a long thin image.
Then write your text in black in the image, like this for example:
Use any font you like, but be warned that more complex fonts may not print well, while simpler fonts generally give better results. There's a border around that text above, but I've put it there just to show you the shape of the image, i.e. long and thin. You should not put a border in your image.
Save the image as a PNG or JPG, then use the file menu of PhotoToMesh to bring it into the program. Or you can simply use copy/paste from your image program into PhotoToMesh, anyway you'll end up with something like this:
You should select Cylindrical Mesh in the Solid Shape combo box. To start with make the diameter of the cylinder roughly twice the height, set smoothing to 1, and have about 1000 X samples (around the ring) and 400 Y samples (height).
You'll need to set the image placement (button top right in the above screenshot) to something like this:
The above settings place the whole of the image across the whole of the cylinder.
Of course you can fiddle with all these settings and you may need to experiment a bit to get the best out of your 3D printer, but I hope this has given you a starting point.
And I you do make something you'd like to share, please email me the photos!
To make larger objects like bracelets you could do them in 3 or 4 solid arcs, as explained here.