The line color defines the order. So in from-scratch designs it’s a general practice to cut from inside out & use different colors so you can do that in case something moves (air assist pushes it, slight warp causes a drop, etc). GF has said they don’t see any real difference in cutting order so their designs have single colored line cuts. The actual processing path/order within a color is determined by the cloud software and is a proprietary algorithm it seems.
To fix it, you’d need to replicate the design in your design software - either trace or draw. Then you’d have full control.
Dang! I was hoping to have one cutting feature control multiple different color lines but then have the color mean the order in which they are cut automatically! But instead, it looks like from earlier in this post, color only means the order things are loaded in the software.
Color determines the default order in the glowforge app, and the order in the glowforge app is the production order. So you can control the order by using color in your design program, and when you load into the glowforge app, that order will be recognized.
However the glowforge app is also flexible, it gives the option of manually re-ordering things if needed.
You can also move each different color in relation to one another within a single design (or move multiple colors at one time).
This is quite handy for those rare times when you decide you do not like how something looks and have enough scrap to play around with some alternative arrangements. Or when doing batch work on scrap material (design in simple grid, bump and shift around holes)
Thank you VERY much for this quick workaround. I was trying to add the one that @mpipes provided but could not seem to find the right paths to the folders. This one worked great, and I will appreciate using it.
When I loaded that swatches file into Illustrator CS6, I only got 13 of the 26 colors. Any thoughts ? I am currently in the process of placing a screen cap of the swatch pallette that @markmak3261 posted and recreating and adding the colors that are missing.
On a side note do we know how many steps that the GF App can handle before it chokes and errors out?
This is what I’m trying to program. The circular engraving test alone will use 20 different steps.
As I understand it since we cannot save settings, that it would be more effective to create high res raster PDF instead of an SVG (with grayscale to test engraving darkness). Because I want to cut a test swatch across all my supplies, as well as use it as a quality control reference for cut quality assessment. (I don’t want to waste my life setting each operation manually every time I want to run a calibration / QC check).
Well that wasn’t wasted since I found out some info that the devs @ GlowForge couldn’t be bothered with to share. That’s 5 hours of my life I want back. @marmak3261 was onto something with the black first and white last and I took it from there.
In a nutshell the Red of RGB is given priority in process sort ordering. Green is given secondary, and blue tertiary (third).
This took far too long. Sequencing a test file and uploading it only to see that it was off and resorting and checking the swatch.
I’ve included a 26 color swatch that is properly ordered which should be of great use to those with large projects to sequence AFTER GF lets us finally save parameters (till then it’s a huge waste of time… better off using hi-res grayscale PDF)
Nice job. @marmak3261’s swatch is good for general use with a dozen colors but for calibration tools (cutting & engraving) settings you really do need more colors or you spend a bunch of time in the GFUI moving things around, copying/pasting and resetting parameters. That’s why I didn’t re-do the templates I uploaded back in the spring even after the new pews & zooms change came out. Figured I’d wait until I got the Pro to do all that again since the PRU is not a good baseline for anyone (me included) going forward.
I wonder if you could recheck your hex code for color number 9 (lime green). I was checking through my Illustrator Glowforge palette to verify the hex codes, and for that one I’m getting #64ff00 if you use the RGB values of 100 255 0. Your value of #c8ff00 seems to correspond to RGB values of 200 255 0.
Thanks for doing all that work! I’d like to try your palette but it does not open properly on my older version of Illustrator (CS5). So I was going to try to get it out of the SVG you posted but that doesn’t download at all (is there an error in the link?).
If I end up recreating the palette for CS5, I’ll go ahead and post it here if that’s okay.
Since I received my Glowforge a few months ago, I’ve been happily making use of the color palette in this thread’s first message (thanks @marmak3261!). I’ve always felt some of the colors are a little too similar, though, so I set out to find a better one. After some searching, I came across Sasha Trubetskoy’s List of 20 Simple, Distinct Colors that was designed to be “easily distinguishable” and “tastefully luminant.” Re-sorted into “Glowforge order,” the palette is:
Black #000000
Navy #000080
Teal #008080
Blue #0082C8
Green #3CB44B
Cyan #46F0F0
Maroon #800000
Olive #808000
Grey #808080
Purple #911EB4
Brown #AA6E28
Mint #AAFFC3
Lime #D2F53C
Red #E6194B
Lavender #E6BEFF
Magenta #F032E6
Orange #F58231
Pink #FABEBE
Coral #FFD8B1
Yellow #FFE119
Beige #FFFAC8
White #FFFFFF
(It’s actually 22 colors if you include black and white.) I suspect I could have arrived at a similar palette by winnowing down @marmak3261’s palette to eliminate some of the confusing pairs, but so be it.
That process got me thinking about colorblindness. I’d heard that to create a palette that’s distinguishable by more than about 85% of the population, you’re limited to under ten colors or so. I found an excellent article by Martin Krzywinski (Color Palettes for Color Blindness) that led me to a seven-color palette (eight if you include white) developed by Bang Wong. In a glowforge sort order, it’s:
Black #000000
Blue #0072B2
Bluish green #009E73
Sky blue #56B4E9
Reddish purple #CC79A7
Vermillion #D55E00
Orange #E69F00
Yellow #F0E442
White #FFFFFF
I’m not colorblind, but I rarely need more than about 4-5 operations in my projects, so I’ve switched to using the Wong palette almost exclusively.
Sorry, @Scott.Burns, I’m not an Illustrator user these days. I know you can easily add all the colors from a document to a palette (or “swatch library”), but I have no idea what the exact command is called. Here are the two palettes as separate SVGs.
You should be able to load one, create a new swatch library, then use the “Add swatches from document” command (or whatever it’s called) to populate it. I suspect the swatches will end up in the wrong order, though, so you’ll have to re-order by hand.
