Crosshatching engrave alternative

[evansd2]

So I thought I’d try some crosshatching experiments. First manually in the GF ui, using the engrave functionality.

I made a semicircle to engrave inside a hexagon. I then engraved at 35 lpi, cut the hex, lifted it out, and rotated it manually by 60 degrees. Ran the engrave again. Here it is after 2 steps:

And here after 3:

And detail:

It was cool but fiddly and I don’t know how useful.

Ages ago I tried manually making fill patterns, it was tedious and this was before clean corners, so I thought maybe I should see what’s up these days. I found a crosshatching extension for Inkscape, which made convenient crosshatching. It looks like this:

And the result… This was after I cleaned the surface (don’t judge me, I used water and soap with a toothbrush, I just was moving quickly and this is a test. As such the surface got a little beat up.)

Cleaned continuous path 90 degree 0.5mm crosshatching (roughly 50 lpi I think):

Cleaned continuous path 90 degree 1mm crosshatching:

Broken-path crosshatching manually angled at 30 degrees:

6 sets of 15 degree offset crosshatched areas going for progressive shading:

3 sets of 30 degree offset crosshatched areas going for progressive shading:

So, what’s the point here? I’m not sure. It’s faster, and aesthetically it’s different. Different can be good, if you’re trying to stand out at a craft show, so… knock yourself out?

I still can’t believe Glowforge hasn’t experimented with different fill patterns to make new aesthetics and at the very least make engraves faster. I published this research years ago (December 2017), they have had plenty of time to implement it. It’d be such a win for them, I think more beneficial and interesting than many of the design features they’ve released.

Super manual engraving

I wanted to see if it would be faster to make my own engraving paths. Basically I made a series of concentric or spiral shapes and scored them to see if it would work as an engrave. The end result is that it does work, with mixed results. All settings are 500/15 on Baltic Birch. This is not a great setting for anything, it was just reasonably fast and showed what I was looking for. First: This is a traditional engrave. Nice and crisp. no hot spots, but slow. Engrave time: 7:00 [image] N…

And halftones:

Halftones in inkscape

Short version: There’s a way to make halftone images in Inkscape. [image][image] Long version: I remembered this technique from a few years ago when I was playing with a pen plotter (No, not a polargraph, but I still kind of want one). Basically, you use Inkscape’s tiled clones feature to get the result you want. This allows for crazy control, but one warning: Be careful of how many nodes you have in your “dot”. It scales up incredibly quickly, and pretty soon you’ll have a beast of an SV…

Anyway, laser stuff and have fun out there

And here are the pics of the piece before I cleaned it for completeness.

Gross.

Gross!

Gross

GROSS

GROSS!

Ewwwww

[rvogt]

These look awesome! I especially like the 1mm!

[deirdrebeth]

@evansd2

This one looks like scales - it would be great on any of the underwater layered designs!

[evansd2]

It’s way easier to do it with the hatching tool and inside inkscape. This is essentially the same trick:

[evansd2]

I just had an idea too, same tricks, but change to a dashed line and then convert the dashes to line segments. Brb, apparently I have things to do

Edit:

Haha, I made 4 concepts, and they are lots of nodes.

I’ll have a full report shortly.

[MakerMatthew]

Hmmm… interesting idea here. Definitely inspiring!

[evansd2]

OK so dashes and crosshatching. This got interesting.

Three squares.

Details on the rightmost

And a circle with tiny uncoordinated dashes:

Yields:

I probably should have spaced the dash pattern a bit further apart on that circle, it looks like a grid… but you can see that there’s some interesting texture to the lines. It probably would have been clearer with less power too.

Anyway, proof of concept done, interesting.

Previously, halftones:

Halftones in inkscape

Short version: There’s a way to make halftone images in Inkscape. [image][image] Long version: I remembered this technique from a few years ago when I was playing with a pen plotter (No, not a polargraph, but I still kind of want one). Basically, you use Inkscape’s tiled clones feature to get the result you want. This allows for crazy control, but one warning: Be careful of how many nodes you have in your “dot”. It scales up incredibly quickly, and pretty soon you’ll have a beast of an SV…

[beerfaced]

That’s my favourite.

[ellencadwell]

I love this one. It looks like basket weaving done with reeds.

[ptodd]

These certainly give some inspiration!

[tim1724]

I love the texture on this one:

@evansd2

Broken-path crosshatching manually angled at 30 degrees:

[deirdrebeth]

Perfect little mounds

[ekla]

@evansd2

I then engraved at 35 lpi, cut the hex, lifted it out, and rotated it manually by 60 degrees.

Genuinely curious - Is there a functional benefit to this versus running three sets of score lines without lifting the piece out in between steps?

[rbtdanforth]

My wonder is how to get centerlines from double lines in Inkscape. Apparently, other programs do it But I can’t figure it in Inkscape or Gimp,

[shogun]

The textures on those are just cool as heck. I need to play with that.

[deirdrebeth]

Inkscape - if you’re tracing, one of the options is centerline. If you already have a vector, break apart and then grab whichever line (s) you actually want.

[evansd2]

@ekla

a functional benefit

@evansd2

It was cool but fiddly and I don’t know how useful.

So one thing I will say is that crosshatching paths can lead to a lot of nodes. This bogs down the file upload and even the UI operation for aligning and stuff. In those cases, it may be better to let GF make the engrave areas and handle all the pathing.

This is an edge case, but then this entire concept is one big edge case, mostly to do it to see if it can be done. I need to revisit the spiral engraving path trick and see if clean corners made it better, I really did like that effect.

[reynoso]

@evansd2

Anyway, proof of concept done, interesting.

Definitely interesting. Thanks for sharing. Another rabbit hole to explore.

[timjedwards]

Fun experiments, very interesting!

[cynd11]

Nice patterns! I’m thinking the 35 dpi trick might be useful for distressing gluing surfaces for better adhesion.