Hi,
I’ve been struggling to figure out how to engrave the outline of shapes I make in illustrator and in my attempts I ran into two different problems:
- When I uploaded my design, I was able to cut or score the outline of the shape or engrave the middle (fill) but not engrave the outline. Intuitively I knew this was because of how glowforge interprets scores and fills but didn’t know what to do about it.
- When I tried making a “shape” using individual lines (rather than the rectangle tool), I would select engrave but then get the “Filled shape is open” error. I wasn’t sure whether glowforge was interpreting the set of lines as a shape and then complaining it wasn’t a closed path or what. Eventually I figured out that the individual stroke likes i was trying to engrave were each being seen as open shapes and those were the errors.
The solution was:
- Make your shape in illustrator. Turn off fill for the object and have a score line with the score width equal to the width you want to engrave.
- Select your shape and then convert the lines you’re seeing into filled closed objects of the same width by going to Object > Path > Outline Stroke.
Kinda obvious in retrospect but since I struggled with it for a few attempts in a row and i see others struggling with it I thought i’d share this tip.
April