Good Evening,
I have a SVG file I uploaded into Glowforge that I want to cut. However, the Glowforge cuts the file into individual pieces. How do I get the Glowforge to cut the graphic as a whole file instead of separating it when it cuts it? When I take it off of the tray, each piece is individual.
Any help, guidance would be appreciated.
Thanks.
You will need to share a picture of the file so we can see where the cuts are. Perhaps you are supposed to score rather than cut some of the parts.
Hello,
Thank you for getting back with me.
Attached are the files I am trying to cut. I did try the score and then cut, but it did the same thing. I also set my cut and score features to - 10 | 10 | 2 passes. Let me know. Thanks. Michele
These files are not laser files. The solid lines are going to get cut and that means a whole bunch of parts and no whole. It is possible that you can engrave the lines, but then you will have no outlines cut.
Oh, okay. So when using SVG files from Creative Fabrica they must be laser cut files in order to cut correctly. Are there any SVG files that I can upload into Glowforge that would cut? Is there a way I can tell which files are laser cut files? Let me know. Thanks. Michele
Important: This is going to get long and detailed. Unfortunately, you asked a simple question with a complex answer. I am going to do this the “long” way, which will have steps that aren’t always necessary but is thorough and should take care of a lot of the issues you find in downloaded files. It won’t be exhaustive, but it will be a good primer into how to approach these things. So, let’s dive in.
All of these files are laserable, but they require some extra work. I’ll take you through the process and then put the modified files at the bottom for you.
I’m going to assume that what you mean in all of this is that you’d like to engrave the pictures and then cut the outlines, so that you have a standalone bear, bow, or elephant.
The processes for doing this are similar, but the three files are of different types – the elephant is a jpeg, and the bow and bear are SVGs. These are what we call raster and vector, respectively.
Let’s also introduce you to Inkscape, a free vector editor that I’ll be using to do all of this. Almost every vector editor does similar things, so if you see something I am doing here, but are more comfortable or familiar with a different editor, it’s probably just a matter of figuring out what that program calls the functions in question.
When you get a new file like this it’s a good idea to inspect it to see what you are working with. I opened bow and see this:
The first thing I do is right-click on the bow and select Object properties to see what type of object it is.
On the right side, we can see that it’s a single “Path”. This is good news, paths are easy to work with.
Inspecting the path and preparing it for engraving, I am looking for a few things: The path should be filled with a color, and have no stroke assigned. In the lower left you can see that it says Fill and Stroke are both “none”, so we should assign a fill color. I’ll choose blue just because:
Cool, the bow’s ready to go. What we need now is a cut outline. This is actually very easy to do when you have a single path to work on – we just need to isolate that outer edge. There are many ways to do this, but the simplest looks like this:
Steps to create a cut outline for the bow:
Duplicate the bow. Select it and go to Edit → Duplicate.
It’ll look like nothing changed, because it makes a copy right on top of your original bow.
Path → Break Apart
This looks like something’s really wrong, because what it just did is separate all the different segments of your bow into their own path elements (Note all the selected object boxes in the blue area), but they get a default fill color, so it looks like a solid blob.
Path → Union.
This looks similar, but you can see it’s one solid shape without a bunch of smaller shapes inside. Union essentially joins all the selected paths into one flat shape. We want to cut this outline, so…
Remove the fill and turn on a (thin) stroke:
I used a red stroke and zoomed in a bit so you can see what you’re working with.
This reveals the original blue filled path underneath the outline you just made, perfect!
Optionally, it’s a good idea to select everything and “group” them, so you can’t misalign them going forward if you move them around.
OK, so that’s how you handle the bow.
We start the same way:
But we see that the bear is actually a group – we need to find out what’s in the group. Sometimes you want to keep the group but in this example I would just ungroup it.
Steps to prepare the bear:
Select Object → Ungroup
Inspect the parts that we just ungrouped and … uh oh, the group contained another group of the inner details.
Ungroup that.
Hah!, that group had two more groups in it:
Ungroup that. Repeat if necessary.
Which had 4 more groups in it…
Ungroup that. Repeat if necessary.
And again, and again. Finally everything is ungrouped and you have 15 objects of type Path selected. It’ll look like this:
Like our last example, this will be easier to deal with if it’s one big path. You can take all these parts and…
Do Path → Combine
Excellent, one big path. Follow the same steps from the bow and you get a clean outline on your bear too:
This is similar with one key difference.
Steps for the Elephant (JPEG):
Open a blank svg.
Drag your elephant file into the Inkscape window and it’ll import it.
Alternately, you can do File → Import and import a jpeg that way.
You’ll see a dialog, it’s pretty safe to use the default options, and you’ll be faced with this:
Now is a good time to choose what size you want your elephant to be. Right now if you look at the top of the window you can see its size as 1.389". Keep in mind that this reflects the entire image, with the white space. I’m going to choose something arbitrary and eyeball it, as scaling this exactly is a whole other topic and something to tackle later. Let’s go with 3" tall.
Path → Trace Bitmap
You’ll get a preview window that looks like this:
What you’re looking for is an accurate trace with clean edges, looks like we have that with this image. This is good news!
Click Apply and it’ll look like almost nothing changed:
But if you look more closely, the traced shape is right atop the elephant. I’ll set a fill color so you can see.
The process for turning this into a cut line is exactly as it was with the bow and bear…
Path → Break Apart followed by Path → Union, then set the fill and stroke.
And that’s it. Now you have an engrave ready to go with cut outlines.
There are multiple ways to do this, some that are faster and some that are more precise. There are ways to prepare jpegs for engraving. There are all kinds of rabbit holes you can get into when optimizing your process for evaluating your downloaded SVGs, but in the end these are the fundamental steps.
Hopefully this all helps!
Here are the three files, as promised:
Thank you @evansd2 for taking the time for this thorough explanation for the rest of us.
This is an absolutely premium service at an unbeatable price!
The way I create a cut path around an image not of my making is to flood-fill in a contrasting color, select that using a threshold of one, and paste into a new file. Then trace bitmap, break apart to separate the shape from the unwanted border.
Took way longer to type than to do. 
As stated, many ways to crack a nut…
You are talking about using the paint bucket in Inkscape? If so, I find that it isn’t great at handling the corners, and performs almost like the path->simplify command, which introduces a bunch of errors.
If you have the time I’d love to see screenshots of your process. It sounds fast and simple – if it worked well I would probably adopt it.
No, I use Gimp for the fill, sorry. It has a lot of “tunability” for most of its tools.
I generally have both Inkscape and Gimp open when I’m doing any kind of design work.
All the advice you got was fabulous.
The only thing I’ll add is that Creative Fabrica is known for stealing art and posting things that don’t actually work (as you found out).
If you’re looking for ready to go things you’ll have better luck with Etsy designers, or the Premium subscription on the 
.
Hello,
Yes, thank you to everyone who has responded and provided guidance.
Thanks again.
Good Evening Everyone,
I still must be doing something wrong. Even the files I obtained from Creative Fabrica as Laser Cut are still cutting into individual pieces. Is there a specific format I need to follow in the Glowforge dashboard so the object cuts as one file? I did see some files that are on Creative Fabrica are also on Etsy. Any guidance you all can provide would be appreciated.
By the way, thank you all so much for responding.
Michele
Have you worked through any of the Glowforge tutorials? If not, I suggest doing so as it will help you recognize how the different elements of a file work together - engrave, score, and cut. Also, try cutting a couple of the files from the Glowforge catalog. Soon you will be able to look at a file and recognize that all of the pieces are going to be pieces rather than a whole just by looking at the lines. You are not necessarily doing anything wrong - you just have poor files and you aren’t experienced yet. The Glowforge interface cannot make a poorly designed file cut well. The interface simply follows the instructions that are in the file design.
I provided you with versions of the files that are ready to be engraved and cut. Did they not work?
Those files are all perfectly fine. They’ve obviously not tried printing them.
All that has to be done is for the file to be opened, material assigned, and the engrave and cut steps assigned appropriate settings. Takes seconds for each file.
The likely culprit sounds like.
