Hello everyone, I am new to Glowforge. I have been trying to 3D engrave on leather, but I cant figure out why it wont give me the option 3D engrave when i upload my drawing.
Welcome to the forum.
The file determines whether or not you have the 3 D options. I will see if I can find some discussion threads to assist you.
This thread may help: 3D engaving
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If i change the material, I can get it to the #D option to come up. But it doesn’t do it right
Right, only some materials will 3D engrave. Can you share more information - what material do you want to use and what is the image you want to engrave?
I know next to nothing about leather, but I don’t imagine it having enough depth for a 3D engraving to make a lot of sense.
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Indeed…now that you mention it…makes no sense at all. Unless, of course they’re engraving on inch-thick leather. 
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I’ve heard of a thick skin, but…
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I figure it out! I put the letters in front of a background, created an outline, and then with Pathfinder, minus the front.
You can engrave on leather. I typically use 8-10oz leather.
There was no argument that you CAN engrave on leather…the discussion led to your wish to use the 3D deep engrave on a material that probably wouldn’t be thick enough to need that setting. Glad you got it all figured out!
“3D Engrave” is a preset that varies the power of the laser beam according to the darkness of each pixel in your artwork. This lets you make a 3 dimensional engraving using a depth map file, or artwork that’s similar to one. For the varying power to result in proportionally varying depths, you need a material that’s a consistent density all the way through, which is why this setting only appears on certain materials that have that property. It sounds like you weren’t in need of this feature, but for reference, you can force it on any material by uploading a raster image (like a BMP or PNG file) and setting the engrave mode to “vary power” in the manual settings panel.
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