Help with design (getting 2 cutting passes on every part of my design)

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Not really sure where to post this, so as to not to run afoul the forum, I will start here.

I have a design, and it is what I would expect would work just fine, it is the 3rd thing I have designed and this is the only one doing this. I will confess, I have read a lot, but I feel something is missing.

The design is all vectors, outlined in black w/ .25 pt.

That is it… but each shape gets 2 passes, I am on pro maple, it is cut in one.

I see people post “Color Swatch” pallets for Glowforge… there is long talks about it. What I am missing is “Do the colors have meaning?” I suspect that they do, but no where do I find the key…

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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What is your design software?

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Illustrator

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Zoom way in and do a command-y to view outlines. I suspect you’ll see double lines very close, or on top of each other. This is pretty common with something that is auto traced. You’ll need to delete one set of the lines.

As for colors, like colors stay together, different colors create new operations. If you had a red stroked circle and a black stroked circle, they would show up as different operations in the UI to assign settings to. If they were both black, they would be one operation with one setting.

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I think you were correct. There was the cut shapes, but there was also a void vector. THANK YOU!

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But I will ask anyway. Do the colors that are used tell the laser something? Do the colors have meaning?

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Each color is seen as a different operation in the Glowforge UI.

For instance, if you draw two objects and they have the same color stroke, GFUI will see them as a single operation with the same settings. If you assign a different color to one object, GFUI will see it as a separate operation and allow you to use different settings for that operation.

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Only in that the GF app will load each color as a separate operation, allowing you to specify cut/score/engrave settings for each as appropriate. It does not automagically assign red to cut, blue to engrave, etc.

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There’s no predefined meaning for colors. You have to assign them yourself in the GF user interface. The predefined palettes are for allowing you to predict what order they’ll be listed in the GF user interface. (It sorts the colors by their hexadecimal RGB values.)

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There are colors that are recommended here. Custom Inkscape, Illustrator, CorelDraw and Affinity Designer Color Palettes for ordering operations in GFUI
Glowforge interprets different colors in seemingly random order.

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No it doesn’t. It orders them in ascending order of the hex value of the color. That’s why the sample swatches are in the order they are. Roughly dark to light.

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