Maps, Maps, Maps

I got it from openvectormaps.com, and then spent a lot of time on cleanup, converting lines to outlines, etc.

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In my experience, itā€™s not so much the actual disk size of the file, but the complexity and amount of the motion planning involved.

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A map lover since I was little ā€¦ these are really awesome!

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These are great! I love the city map over the mirror. Nice touch!

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I love maps!

These are both wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

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not much to add, except great job!

What wonderful maps! Looks like you need to put a pin on Portland :slight_smile:

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Wow, those are absolutely amazing. Nice, nice, nice job.

As is my advocation, I shall now steal all your ideas: Done.

Thank you for patronizing the Idea Thief.

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Thankfully, we have a free exchange of ideas here. It is the question of actual content that gets bought and sold.

ā€¦or possibly stolen.

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Here is a nice site that has World Map files in various projections plus various options for the Central Meridian including one at 90 degrees which is thru central USA @Jules.

Files include both lines and polygons so you can do line and fill work.

There are also highly detailed files for the Continental U.S. and all states.

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Indeed! As I try to be as fair a Thief as possible, I hope to provide as much if not more ideas back for others to steal.

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Indeed, Iā€™ve already started that process.

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Gah! You beat me to it :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:, it looks gorgeous! I was planning on doing a project like that for portland, but that is way better than I was planning. Well done!

Oooh! Thanks for the link! That will come in handy! :grinning:

wow, impressive! Even better because itā€™s Portland <3

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Love it! Nice job, and the corkboard is a great idea.

Iā€™m planning on doing maps when I get my GF, and by chance Iā€™m also in Portland. :slight_smile: But one thing that concerned me a little was that file size; it didnā€™t look like a complex vector file at all, and <2MB seems like it shouldnā€™t choke anything. Iā€™m actually now pretty concerned that the maps Iā€™m doing - which I estimate will have more than 3,000 distinct bezier curve paths - may not be printable.

Anybody else having issues with complex vector files not working?

Very creative! Love them all. Iā€™ll have to watch for more info on this size, memory, path planning issue. Might be nice if GF, or once of our owners, did a tutorial on how to best manage this.

I really love these, fantastic job!

@kelly1, Iā€™m not sure what software you are using to do all your vector editing. Iā€™ve been using Adobe Illustrator as I am more familiar with it. There is an option to ā€œsimplifyā€ a path (Object->Path-Simplify), and give it degrees and precentage of error to keep the path within, that helps quite a bit in making the file a lot easier to process.

Currently, your :glowforge: can take any file that takes up to 3 hours to print. If it takes longer, it usually manifests itself as an error when ā€œpreparing your fileā€ after you hit the print button, and it scans your material.

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A separate issue I had was that designs that had a bunch of elements would take forever to render. The interface treated each as a separate repositionable item. The fix was to put a bounding box of a different color around everything, then set that box to ā€œignoreā€. The interface then treated everything within the box as a single item and it rendered quickly.

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