I work with a lot of acrylic and if it’s something like the angel where you want to have a seamless look the defocus can help smooth it. Increased LPI (lines per inch) can help as well because you’re getting overlap to burn more material. LPI can be changed in the manual settings or by clicking the arrow to the right of the proofgrade settings. Have no fear of losing the PG settings, they reset.
Most importantly DO NOT walk away from acrylic while it is engraving especially if you change settings. It can easily catch on fire.
You manually set material height to be different from actual.
If you search for that term, you’ll find many discussions about it, but you would need to experiment with your material and adjust your existing settings to determine what works best for you.
To defocus the laser, you set your focus height in a way that lies to the machine and makes it focus above the actual material. For example, if you are engraving Proofgrade clear acrylic, the proofgrade settings assume a focus height of .125. To defocus, you would manually input a different focus height, like .25. The Glowforge would focus above the actual material and the beam that hits the material would be spread out.
