Hi, first post in the forums. I am making earrings for my wife. I merged the earring outlines to one shape. The earrings have no fill. I dropped and mandala shape into the earrings meant to be engraved. When I loaded the svg into the glowforge app it has filled all the white space in the earrings to be engraved and all of the mandala that is outside of the earrings shape is also showing up to be engraved. How do i get the app to not engrave the fill of the earrings empty space and not engrave the mandala shape outside of the earrings? Thank you for the help.
The Glowforge interface cannot process clipping masks. You will have to fix this in Affinity. I believe the forum has some solutions to this like rasterizing and then tracing for a vector. Search the forum for Affinity and clipping masks as I am not an Affinity aficionado.
The laser recognizes different colors as different operations, so on the sidebar thumbnails, you will have the opportunity to assign each thumbnail a different property like cut or engrave.
Personally, as @dklgood said I would rasterize it, and that eliminates the clip mask issue. Then assign the outline a different color and set that as a cut.
Which design software are you using?
Thanks, this is helpful. I’m on affinity designer, but I also have affinity photo. So if export the vector file to photo and rasterize it, that will remove anything that has been clipped? And as long as I have my curves in different colors, I can set the a unique glowforge process to each color? Just want to make sure I have it right. I did absolutely no research. I just opened it and started making things and this is the first issue I’ve had. Thanks for the response!
You jump in with both feet as you did. the initial struggle is the most difficult, but it’s not that bad. You will have the fundamentals down shortly. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I wandered in here. The community members here cleared my path.
The stroke or fill colors are what I was referring to, the design elements. The user interface will treat each color as its own operation.
I don’t know Affinity, but a bunch of people here do. Just stand by and someone who does will be by.
I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve hit this snag!
It looks like our amazing community has provided some next best steps to help resolve the trouble. Please let me know if the advice @dklgood and @PrintToLaser helps, or if you still run into the same trouble.
I think @Xabbess uses Affinity? I’ll tag her. it would help if you could post the file here. Just right-click and select Save as>zip file, and drag & drop that in your reply, that way someone who knows the program can diagnose it for you.
Really appreciate it. Affinity is great. I have a t-shirt graphic design business. Moved over from Adobe and don’t miss it at all. My experience probably gives me a little leg up working with the glowforge. Until it does something different than a vector program, that is. Haha
In Inkscape, after setting the clip area, you select “create bitmap copy” and it makes, well, a copy of just the clipped portion of the design - a bitmap version of what you are seeing on-screen. You can then delete the version with the clip applied.
I’m on the iPad version of affinity. I am unaware if that feature exists, but I have inkscape on my laptop. Rasterizing the file makes sense to me, I think haha. So I’m definitely going to try that. I did export it as a png but then it did not give me the option to cut. I’m assuming bitmap would be the same?
You keep the cut paths (red in your pic), just apply the bitmap copy function to the clipped mandala design. The bitmap will engrave, the cut paths can be cut.
In Inkscape you can make a copy of the earrings and Path>combine them and then select the vector mandala and do a Path> intersection and you will have just the parts of each. Make the colors different between the original earring shape and the cut outs and save the design to bring into the GFUI Easy peasy! Now both are vectors so you can choose score or engrave for the design part.
Easy peasy! Now both are vectors so you can choose score or engrave for the design part.