Can anyone get this to work?

[mrinken]

http://sandyeggo.com/project/marvel-character-disc/

Trying to get the SVG filled in file to work. It loads but when you go to print it prepares your design forever and either gets stuck on that screen or just craps out.

Want to do this on a piece of proofgrade maple for my step daughter seeing as she’s a big Marvel fan and I’m essentially stretching it to be as big as possible for an engrave. I have done the score outline one but it creates a pretty charred finished result as a lot of the lines are close together. I was hoping the filled in one would work well for an engrave.

I just don’t have the skillset to bring it into Illustrator or something else and clean it up. If it were AutoCAD, that would be another story…

[evansd2]

The trick here is to convert it to a png, using inkscape or something. It’s really easy to do.

Once you convert it to a high resolution raster image, it’ll engrave no problem. You can find other people who have done it by searching for “marvel calendar” or just “marvel”. In fact, I believe the original creator is a member of the forum.

[mrinken]

Did that last night - will try when I get home from work today. Thanks!

[evansd2]

(Sorry if you already know this stuff, but it’s worth posting occasionally.)

The only additional advice I’ll give it that you will probably want to be sure that the functional resolution of your final piece is 300 dpi or higher or so.

So, take the width dimension of your png, (say 2000 px) and then divide it by the final piece’s width (say you are engraving it to be 6" across), and you end up with 2000 pixels/6", which is about 330 PPI(DPI). Your end engrave will look great. [without getting any further than necessary into this, other things matter here too, like the materials you’re using and LPI settings on your engrave etc etc… but a good baseline with your art starts with DPI, You can correct most other things with settings but if your source image is low res or quality, you’re dead in the water.)

This sort of export resolution is easy to modify when you do the export in inkscape, and probably is easy in most vector editing programs.

If you want to make a 10" wide calendar, it’ll need to be at least 3000 pixels wide, etc. Anyway, I won’t get into the other caveats about maximum engraving complexity(time) and whatnot, I assume you know most of that… heck you probably knew all of this.

[mrinken]

Some of it I knew, some I didn’t. And thank you for taking the time to write all of that out!

I’m always amazed at the generosity of the people in these forums. I ask a lot of questions I could probably easily find the answer for if I took the time to research or search these forums (I’m getting better at that!).

In this case I should have done more research, but after 2 hours trying to get it to go (and a couple of beers!) I thought I’d throw it out there.

Thanks again!!!

[evansd2]

but after 2 hours trying to get it to go

I’ve been there, beating your head on a problem can get old.

[wbgraphic]

The designer posted the project here last year and a lot of people worked on different approaches for the Glowforge.

You may find some useful info in the original thread.

[mrinken]

Of course he did - THANK YOU!

I promise I will SEARCH before posting again next time, I PROMISE!

[jbmanning5]

Bookmarking this post

I usually shoot for a PPI 2x my intended LPI. If you search PPI 600 and my user name, you should be able to find a post I made a while back showing the difference between different resolutions.

[ca_worth]

ummm you left out the part about how painful it is.

[mrinken]

Bookmarked!

[kyle_emerick]

The file was updated on my website to include an SVG that is broken down into three sections so it will print easily on the Glowforge.

You can download the file here: http://sandyeggo.com/project/marvel-character-disc/

It is the one called “SVG Format (dark areas filled in)”

[mrinken]

Got it and engraved it twice last night - thank you so much!