I am excited about this...Laser Foil on Laser Tile!

No worries! I really sort of hate to care. :smiley: Since you explained it though, I remember reading about that elsewhere on here, but it wasn’t (yet) first-hand experience for me.

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Me, neither, @shop

@Xabbess Perhaps I’m being dim, but can’t work out what you’ve done to achieve such a dramatic effect.
Probably because I’m not familiar with the materials you’ve used.

:upside_down_face:

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@Xabbess, wow it looks fantastic! Keep meaning to get me some of that laser tile; it gives such nice contrast.

@johnbrooker, didn’t I send you a sample of the gold polyester film I’ve been using? It’s the same stuff.

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@cynd11 Thanks for the heads up, and great ! Only 10 days I’ll be reunited with SWMBO and GF.
She has tornados, we have blizzards !!!

:upside_down_face:

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Not that I know of, but if anyone is interested in persuing it, the secret lies with removing sharp point corners in the design before processing it. (Which consists of placing an additional node on either side of the corner node, deleting the corner node, and allowing the point to round out naturally. Then the head doesn’t pause to change direction. I used to do that with digital cutting files to prevent tearing in tight corners.)

I believe Illustrator has a corner-rounding function somewhere too - I use a plugin for complex files.
:slightly_smiling_face:

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Just to make sure that I’ve got it right - is the effect produced by the gold foil, stuck on the tile, being engraved away, so that where the engraved area has vaporised the gold foil , it has also made the coating on the tile black ?

:upside_down_face:

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Hey…I’ve seen that before in AD…I’m pretty sure I have a choice of ‘corners’. Never knew what it was for, but I’ll bet that’s the equivalent to AI. I thought of that, too…if everything was slightly rounded, it wouldn’t need to function quite like it does. I’ll check it out sometime. Thanks!

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…not at all, John! Maybe since Cyndi reminded you of the foil she gave you, you’ve now figured it out? It took me a long time and watching that demo video several times (the guy using the foil for that Harley Davidson logo) to figure out how to make my files. I made two for testing…one for vector and one for raster. The bottom one gets scored around the shape (no fill)…and the Xabbess (filled) gets engraved. The top one has the lettering with no fill or stroke, combined on a filled shape which gets engraved. Clear as mud?

You are correct!

As grandaughter would say - ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool - a twofer’.

:upside_down_face:

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This came out great! I am looking to experiment myself with Laser Foil and was wondering your insight on settings you used on the glowforge. Also I was wondering about ‘laser tile’ haven’t heard of this before, is there a special place to purchase this and does this tile allow for laser engraving directly on tile?

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I get both, but not at the same time. Just the rare thunder snow.

Nice work. I like you formed a metal band.

^^??
Heavy Metal . . . .?
Wedding . . .?

:upside_down_face:

I see a band logo in the style of a hard rock/metal band.

After I hit reply, I thought, should have added one more sentence.

We had two Cat 5 Hurricanes in 10 days. Can anyone explain what happened to the weather? (tongue in cheek)…

I use 1000/100/LPI 340 on the tile…with or without the foil. I used about half those settings for scoring with foil; 500/50. I’ve been using Laser Tile a lot and until this test with foil, directly on the tiles. Here’s one of my posts, but a search will turn up more.

I’m now working on putting my brother’s black and white drawings on tile.

Here’s where you can order…

www.lasertile.com

Be forewarned…it takes them a long time to arrive

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Just posted…

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I use this script for rounding corners - the built-in Illustrator function is good, but often doesn’t work as one might want when prepping stuff for lasers… this script has it’s foibles too but I’ve used it for a lot of fine papercut work to avoid burn-through.

This still works with AI CC 2018:
http://cdn.tutsplus.com/vector/uploads/legacy/articles/2010/article_illustrator_plugin_scripts/scripts/RoundAnyCorner.zip

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Oh that’s nice, I didn’t realize there was a cheaper alternative available. :grinning:

I’ve been using the Xtream Path plugin for years but it’s pricey. (Totally agree the built-in AI function isn’t quite up to snuff.)