Day 2 with Emmet: It's A Party!

Made on a Glowforge
1

Alright, now that we got the frustrating incident out of the way, (see "Millennium Falcon from… A not so nice place!), It’s time to move on to the fun stuff!

Remember I said I kept this purchase a secret from my dad & brother for a year and a half, because I knew how much they’d love it? Guess who came over today!!

707×707 101 KB

He really loves Snoopy…

707×707 121 KB

F22 Raptor!!! (Bonus, we actually saw one of these in the sky later in the day thanks to an airshow a few miles over)

707×707 126 KB

So this isn’t my brother… But at least I got a pic of what he made, right?

612×816 118 KB

She loves drawing, she love Harry Potter… So naturally, she drew something from Harry Potter. Think she’s gonna take it home and turn it into a necklace.

707×707 115 KB

Antique Singer Sewing Machine fits my mom perfectly.

707×707 128 KB

We put this thing through the paces today… It actually scared me when Emmet went to calibrate at one point and seemed like he was having a seizure. The arm got stuck in the middle with the head at the far left and every few seconds the light would flash and the head would shake back and forth quickly.

Turned it off, unplugged it, gently pushed the arm to the back and the head to the far right (where they make you place it when you first set it up), went to dinner and when we came home everything was fine.

612×816 114 KB

Truly, an enchanted rose…

612×816 84 KB

My nephew thought the :glowforge: was so cool he needed to get an F18 Super Hornet to go with his other jet… By this point we got smart and started “cleaning up the images” in photoshop so they’d be laser ready. I use the quotes because I actually broke all the rules of good photography & blew out the highlights on the picture and jacked-up the contrast so the end result would look a lot more like the original image. Definitely came out much better than the first plane engrave.

612×816 151 KB

It was a fun time! Everyone was dreaming of what they could do with it and looking at each other like “We need one of these!”

77 Likes
2

I think a Glowforge party is way better than a Tupperware party!

18 Likes
3

The F18 looks very 3D. I think it must be because it is cut out, so you have no surrounding board to convince you it is 2D.

12 Likes
4

This has happened to me a few times. Record the time and send a note to support. Near as I can tell, it’s trying calibrate, but thinks the head is on the right, so it keeps trying to move left. You can turn off Emmet, move the head under the camera, then turn it back on, and it should calibrate and work fine after that.

17 Likes
5

I too have had this happen a few times. The solution works every time and that’s also what support told me.

7 Likes
6

Will do! Thanks for the tip!

3 Likes
7

Such fun to see how members of your family across a great range of ages had a fantastic time with Emmet. I’ve been dreaming for, well, two and a half years of having the equivalent of Laser Thursday.

3 Likes
8

Good job! Have fun exploring the new toy.

3 Likes
9

It looks like Emmet is a Hit! :grinning:

1 Like
10

Fun for the whole family! That’s great!
Speaking of family… and Emmet… Anybody ever tell you your dad looks a lot like Christopher Lloyd?! At least in that pic.

When you cut your planes and other objects, how did you apply the cut vector to your raster images?

1 Like
11

No kidding! It’s funny too because a number of years ago (and when he weighed significantly more than he does now) everyone always said he looked exactly like John Goodman.

These projects were all from random images online when I was first beginning to figure things out on the Glowforge UI. Basically, by the end of the day I had come up with a pretty quick process to make it all happen:

  1. Find the right image online (especially those with the object in a non-distracting background, which makes it much easier to work with for this kind of thing).
  2. Open it in Photoshop, change the color mode to grayscale and adjust the contrast (typically making the whites whiter and the darks darker; then the midtones brighter too so it didn’t try to engrave so much—something I didn’t do on the earlier projects).
  3. Save the jpg image.
  4. Still in photoshop, select the background and delete it or make it white; select the object and make it black.
  5. Save this as a separate jpg image.
  6. Open a new document in Illustrator and choose File > Place. Select the black object file and drop it in.
  7. Center it and choose Object > Image Trace > Make & Expand
  8. With the direct selection tool, choose the area around the shape and delete it (because on a rectangular jpg, the image trace will create a white shape around your object)
  9. On the remaining object shape, switch the fill & stroke so the fill is none and the object has a red stroke (this is your cut line)
  10. File > Place the first jpg image you saved of the b&w contrasty object onto a new layer and center it on the page—it should fit perfectly inside your cut lines since both files came from the same original image.
  11. Save out an svg with “Embed Image” option turned on (so the engrave image you just added stays in the file)
  12. Upload the svg to the :glowforge: app.

DISCLAIMER: (I’m typically very careful about not using images I don’t have the rights to, but in this case we were looking for some quick satisfactory projects to test things out and give to close family… I would NEVER do this kind of thing and try to sell them or take credit for the artwork)

11 Likes
12

just so you know, you can actually skip this step by choosing the “ignore white” box in advanced options in the expand palette. now, that will also delete any white inside, but it shouldn’t be a problem w/the way you’re using it.

6 Likes
13

WHAT?! How have I not known about this? I learned all the Adobe programs back around CS5 and they always update so many things I just stopped paying attention to most of the stuff. I feel like there’s so many little things like this in the program that either I apparently never knew or they added and… I never knew. Thanks for the tip!

5 Likes
14

there is so much crap that so many of us have no idea. especially those of us who have been using these programs forever, because we learned ways around problems that Adobe eventually fixed and we just didn’t catch it.

i literally go back to illustrator 88 / freehand 3 / corel 2.0 / photoshop 2.5. i remember when they announced InDesign was coming and i had a demo copy of 1.0 (clunky) but i was so psyched about how the typography tools were going to blow Quirk… erm… i mean Quark out of the water.

4 Likes
15

Wow. He’s lost a LOT of weight then. I definitely see the Christopher Lloyd in that pic though.

Thanks for that! I’ll give that a try!

3 Likes