Dots Populating on Design?

[adamrutledge]

Hi, all, fairly new ish. Have been using glowforge lasers for around 6 months. I have an aura.
I have been designing my own SVG files. I design it in procreate then transfer to inkscape and turn it into a SVG. Then upload to glowforge app and, in the app it looks clear and great.

But the engrave settings do look different. It shows a “Grayscale = convert to dots? convert to pattern? Vary power?” option I do not usually see when I upload designs from the web or, use the glowforge in-app designs.

It also allows me to set the amount of lines or dots per inch, and I don’t yet know exactly what that does or changes. Same with pattern density though that one feels, mostly self explanatory.

So, I put my design over my material and send it. But it prints, with a bunch of rows of dotted stipling over the design, that is not shown on the screen. It causes me a great deal of confusion, and has now happened with two seperate designs of mine.

When it happened with the first, I printed it 8+ times and by the final attempts the dots just, went away on their own? It went from dots through the whole design, to dots only on half, to no dots and a perfect print…

I am curious if the same will happen with this design, so I am running it a few more times to see.

But, does anyone know why this is happening?

I’ll try and update this post with some pics soon.

Thanks.

[rbtdanforth]

There are times when dots work best. Think of an old newspapef image. The ink is either there or not as there is no gray. So lots of dots are dark to few dots for light. To do well you need space between dots at the darkest and at least some dots at the lightest. There are sliders where you see the range strip that may be hard to spot at first.
Then you need to size the dots. For a very large image, bigger dots (~340) work but for small or detailed images you may find very small dots (~1355) can be needed. This can take a lot of time, but not as long as you will be wishing you spent that time. You might want to experiment with some small images first as it might take some practice t9 get a feel for it,
The power setting and speed need more than usual consideration as that will affect your minimum dot size.