hi! I hit a snag. I want to engrave a brick wall pattern. I created it in Illustrator by creating a long L shape, then duplicating it a million times to get the brick wall pattern. I export a STL and upload to glowforge. It didn’t work. Then I took all the brick pieces and did a UNITE on them thinking that it would reduce the number of objects to 1. I still get an error.
Any ideas on how to tame that image into something that the glowforge can deal with? Thanks!
In Inkscape this has 15,292 objects. Can you rasterize?
For one thing, every single element appears to be repeated 4 times.
You could start by reducing that to one and see if that works. I show 49,000 total, so you’d be down to close to a number which should process ok.
If you’re engraving, it’s almost always easier/better to rasterize in Illustrator and then drop into GFUI.
You avoid weird vector happenings or overly complicated vectors struggling to load.
The challenge with a pattern like this, is most of the shape tools, like UNITE, are intended to operating on shapes, where this pattern is really a whole bunch of paths (unclosed?).
Hope that helps.
The job will process faster if you rasterize the engraving layer as well. Glowforge’s raster planner is faster than the vector planner, which has to rasterize your design to engrave it anyway.
Super helpful stuff here. Thanks! But I am still confused. I selected all the bricks and rasterized them. It still doesn’t work. Here is my illustrator file.
bricks.zip (637.4 KB)
That is not rasterized. They are still all individual vector elements.
Rasterizing doesn’t help. It still causes an error. I might not be rasterizing correctly…
Can’t help with AI. I use Inkscape.
You might want to post in the Everything Else forum section. This section is intended for community help with the machine or GF UI, and many members have it blocked.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to do, but I spent 10 minutes fiddling around with this, and you can watch me here, in case that’s helpful:
Oh my gosh! Thank you for doing this! I will try this right away! Stay tuned…
Let me know how it goes 
Also – are you in Vermont? I grew up near Rutland, VT 
But I live in San Francisco now. I miss VT!
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