Made a file in inkscape full of strokes / paths. I pulled it into GFUI and it assumes everything is a CUT. I want the drawing to engrave, and it lets me change to engrave, but the drawing disappears. The oultine cut is still there, just not the engrave. Oddly, if I hit print, it estimates an hour to print it, which means the engrave is still in there. But it’s not in the laser red-line animation.
What can I change in Inkscape to make GF willing to engrave this?
It might be that your engrave is outside the range for engraving. Try moving the engrave object to the center of the bed image, away from the edges, and see if that works.
Otherwise, feel free to post the design here and any of us can take a quick look at tell you what’s going on.
Small drawing. Middle of platform. Drawing is inside outline cut, which it’s fine with. Bounding box looks right.
Here’s the file (Hopefully):
If you want to engrave a shape, give it a Fill color and no stroke color on the paths. When you set up a stroked path to be engraved, it will do exactly that, but it will only engrave the width of the stroke. Depending on how tall it is, it will still take up to several hours to process, because the engraving happens left to right on the bed like an old dot matrix printer.
Couple of tutorials that describe what is going on here:
havent looked at your file. But for an engrave, it needs to be closed, filled paths.
Or, you need to convert what you have to a raster, which will give you a WYSIWIG.
Like @Jules said, that object needs to be filled in order to engrave it. You’ve got just strokes.
For what it’s worth, I imagine you don’t want to engrave that, but score it. And you should be able to score it as-is.
Yeah, I just looked at it - just give the scorpion a thicker stroke (about 1 pt) so you can see the lines, then rasterize the scorpion. That is an incredible amount of data to try to leave in there. It’s going to look choppy and burn at the corners if you try to Score it. Your best bet is going to be rasterizing it in Inkscape before you save the file as an SVG.
Looking at your file, set the scorpion image to a score and you’ll be happy (and it will go fast)
The text should engrave perfectly
The outline should cut fine too
Thanks for the help! I’m learning something about Inkscape!
I was avoiding vector here because I’m making an edge-lit acrylic, and the last time I tried vectors instead of raster engrave, I found that the GF doesn’t turn the laser down as it slows down at the end of lines, so I get lots of little dips at turn-arounds. It looks like a freeze-frame of a hailstorm.
Has GF fixed this issue yet?
Nope, it’ll stay hot on the turns.
Convert your scorpion to a raster and let it engrave, it will give you a predictable finish.
If you check this you’ll see where I did score most of the acrylic. I like the effect but my graphics weren’t as dense are yours.
Edit:
Here is your file with a raster scorpion. You’ll notice it renders a lot faster in the GFUI too.
Scorpion Raster.zip (216.6 KB)
You can use a slow score to combat this problem. Probably down around 125-130, but you need to compensate by lowering the power. However, on a vector where you have lots of paths/scores crossing, or similarly placed beginning or ending points, you will get more burn, unless you modify the design.
Thanks for the help everybody. I’m going to close this thread - if you have any more questions, go ahead and post a new topic.
