Any Illustrator Pros look at this and see why it's stuttering through the cuts?

reindeer_sled.ai (380.5 KB)

When cutting, the cuts are not smooth, and stuttering all over the place, which is resulting in horrible burns in the cut that look awful. I can’t see any issue with the file.

I had to re-import into CS6 (16.0.0), so it’s possible that something that was making it bad got lost. But it generally looks good. I’d try removing the Group and Clipping Path, and just make it as simple as possible.

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I just cut one on draftboard and it worked perfectly so I’d assume it’s something other than the file. The area where the antlers meet the head is really thin though and I’d widen it a bit. (I just checked at the line width on the file I opened and they were not hairline. When I changed it, the antlers cut much better/wider.) Was the material perfectly flat, no tiny debris on the tray etc. Nothing on the rails? (My cell is dead or I’d post a pic of the one I cut.)

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Hmmm. Interesting.

Just saw this post. Might be worth a look.

That’s not good. It doesn’t look like it’s getting hung up, it looks like it is doubling back to do points that don’t exist.

It might be helpful if you also post a zip file of the SVG that AI exported that you actually uploaded to the GFUI.

That way the experts here may be able to spot a flaw that might be introduced by your workflow.

Other than changing the line width on the first one, I didn’t make any changes. Do you have a pic of what yours cut like? (edited to dd: the masking and soot is still on.)

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Not sure if it would help you in this case, but you could try reducing anchor points by Object/Path/Simplify and set it to 99 or 98% curve precision. If you click the preview box it will tell you how many points you began with and how many it reduced to, as well as displaying how the path has changed. Sometimes that will imperceptibly remove unnecessary anchors and smooth the vector path that the laser will follow.

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@willcfc The pathing looks relatively clean as far as unnecessary anchor points, etc. It could be cleaned up a little bit but all in all, it’s not bad.

I don’t see stray points, duplicated paths, etc. I did notice that none of the paths are actually closed… the beginning and end are very, very close but the paths, aren’t closed.

The behavior you are describing… is it that you feel it’s not running an efficient cutting path (i.e., that it’s doing one cutout here and then jumping somewhere else and doing a cutout)? Or something else? The actual order of the cuts, I don’t know - but it shouldn’t be starting a cut, stopping a cut, and then coming back to resume a cut or anything like that, with the way this file is set up.

Some of the lines are a little bit wavy and some of the corners are very sharp… both of those could be smoothed out, but I’m not sure if those things are a problem for you.

Could you post a screenshot of your SVG settings when you export the file out?

What I’m mostly curious in is how many decimal places you are exporting it with (see screenshot). From a web perspective, exporting with fewer decimal places is something that’s used quite a bit as it reduces the file sizes (every decimal place is extra bits of data). But, this is used for positioning of all of the points and paths - so if it’s too low, you’re going to have imprecise plotting of the points and when you have elements that are pretty close to each other, that could potentially lead to problems.

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My decimal place was set to 1. I changed it to 4 to match your screenshot. The issue is that the cut will go into a corner, then slow down, and jerk back and forth, or around a radius. I can cut any other file I’ve been working on and it’s fine. I converted this from a DWG file…so I’m guessing it’s something to do with that.

At first glance I’d say you have far more anchor points than are necessary for these shapes:

Like @TexanGothic said, running Simplify would probably help you. Even at 90% Curve Precision and Angle Threshold cranked to max you’d only have 1/3 the points.

Also - the GFUI accepts PDFs, too. Instead of wrestling with SVG export variables you could save out as PDF since you’re already in Illustrator.

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The original had over 33,000 points. LOL

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Yikes! :flushed:

I can understand why machines that are doing their processing on the fly on an Arduino have trouble with excess control points, but with the motion planning in the cloud, it seems like Glowforge would have a lot more horsepower to optimize those infamous waveforms.

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Yes - that’s the whole point (for me) of using a cloud controller for this… I want serious path optimization and serious smarts for handling these calculations. I’m really hoping we’re working with the MVP model here and there’s a lot of improvements to come down the pike as time goes on.

I remain a fan, but boy it’s a raw product right now.

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