I personally think score = vector engrave
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Really, when the laser hits wood it’s “marking” it, “scoring” it, “engraving” it, and “cutting” it ALL at the same time, regardless of what depth the laser reaches.
OK, so my only gripe is engrave means raster engrave on GF, which is confusing because it doesn’t mean that in English and scoring is a form of engraving also.
Presumably the screwy bit will get fixed so raster engraving an SVG will give an image that matches how it renders in a browser.
The terminology could be thought that way. I’m certainly not the thesaurus. Either way I don’t see score as GF uses it to be any different than a cut line. But you can send an SVG with paths or just a plain bitmap image to the engrave function and it will create the image in a raster like method.
I agree with you a bit on this one. The only difference in my mind is that the movement for an engrave is like a printer, where the movement for a score is like…a pencil? Essentially a score moves the same as a cut instead of the engrave, but they both only burn away part of the material, where the cut is the only one that burns THROUGH the material.
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What if you make the laser head sweep back and forth over paper, and the laser goes all the way through? Would that be “raster cutting”?
If you vector score some paper but it cuts through, was it really a score?
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I looked at the software for the other manufacturers…
Trotec, the only one I can vouch for myself, has cut, engrave, and positioning. I don’t know what “positioning” is. I’m guessing it simply moves the head, but I don’t know what purpose that would serve.
Epilog seems to have raster and vector.
Source: 2I_rghzEakw (in the video the guy calls the two operations “vector cutting” and “raster etching”)
Universal seems to have raster, vector, and engraving field. I wonder what “engraving field” means.
Source: DfTd3iSxOtE
RDWorks seems to have cut, scan, and dot.
Source: WigKauz5zY0 The title says “rdworks” but the video shows a program named “Thunder Laser”. Surely a rebranding of the RDWorks software.
FSL’s software, Retina Engrave, seems to have raster engrave and vector cut.
Source: vKIwweIGpRs
What seems to be the K40 software, LaserDRW, seems to have engraving, cutting, and marking.
Source: UDMvCDyZFJg
And, of course, Glowforge has cut, engrave, and score.
Source: @marmak3261’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR96qGSO3JU
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I think it is the intent that we are talking about. So if you tell the machine to score and it goes through the settings are faulty. Yes it produced a cut but you told it to score.
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You see, some lasers don’t have cameras on them to show you where the design will be on the material, so you have to watch the laser head move over the whole outline in order to try and optimize material consumption…
That or it is a command for simply moving the laser head to a specific location. Again, something we don’t really ever need to do because of the camera controls.
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I’ve seen that. But the Trotec JobControl UI has a different command to perform an outline of a job.
Total speculation here since I haven’t used Trotec… but possibly one command outlines where you actually will work (a heart shape results in heart motion), but the other does the smallest rectangle which encloses the whole job.
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Yeah, you’re probably on to something here.
Sometimes the outline does a rectangle and other times it goes around the… outline. No idea what factors into which is used. I haven’t used the feature very many times (I prefer relying on measurements to trying to verify visually) but I can imagine some places where preparing custom outline geometry could be helpful.
If you can explain how you would engrave a filled shape without some form of scanning, I’d love to hear it (yes you can snake back and forth in a continuous manner but that is scanning). At some point given these are stepper motors you have to turn this into “dots” whether you turn the laser off between movements is a different thing, but it gets made as discrete steps.
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You don’t get filled shapes with a vector engrave, or score as it is called. It is just vector paths and any stroke width or fill should be ignored.
Stepper motors don’t turn motion into dots. The head of a laser cutter / 3d printer moves fluidly, the mass of the head smooths out the microsteps and you get continuous motion unless moving very very slowly.
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I beg to differ. This is a pure vector file (made with AI using the pen tool) and that is a filled shape (actually it is multiple filled shapes, with the middle star being filled with a different color than the outer background, so I could vector engrave at different colors)
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I think the problem is that “vector” is being used in two different senses in this discussion (and elsewhere). For some of us, at least in some cases, “vector” means a line/curve: like the mathematical thing with a direction and a magnitude. For others, it always means the kind of graphics that’s not bitmaps or things like them. For the first meaning, “vector fill” makes no sense; for the second, “vector fill” is an obvious operation.
(It gets even a little more linguistically messy than that, because although the GF cloud conceptually rasterizes vector images, when it generates the waveforms that drive things it doesn’t necessarily think in terms of pixels but rather of places along a line where it changes the beam intensity. And with microstepping, even the motor control is subject to argument over whether it’s best thought of as digital or analog.)
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It is a vector file but it has been rasterised and raster engraved. We are talking at cross purposes. To you vector engrave means using a vector file. To me vector engrave is moving the head along paths described by vectors. In Glowforge terminology that is scoring.
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If there wasn’t established industry terminology you’d be completely correct.
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Are your internet searching abilities good enough to find a machine manual that uses the phrase “vector engrave” in the way you’re describing? It seems to me, and I’m admittedly fairly new to this, that “engrave” is basically synonymous with inkjet printer-style movement. Sure, there are places where the word “engrave” isn’t used at all, but when it is used, it seems to only mean one thing, and that is to differentiate it from vector-driven movement.
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