Not sure how to do something

I have a picture that I want to put on a 3" circle. I want to cut this circle out of the material (so make a coaster with my pattern / design in the middle.

I can do my pattern without an issue, but how do I add the outer circle (or shape) and have that cut through?

You’ll need a vector program to do that, such as Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator.

Here is a perfect circle though that you can add via the “Add Artwork” button and rescale to your design.

Right click and save as and then extract the circle.svg file
circle.svg.zip (323 Bytes)

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So I can just create my basic shape in Illustrator and then export the SVG. In GF I then add the new Artwork and set it to be a “cut”.

that sound right?

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Yep! For a cut, do a shape with a stroke, but no fill.

Different colors will be seen as different steps by the GF app, so you can change the order of operations.

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Better to create the whole thing as one file in Illustrator as currently you can only line up things by eyeballing them. If you’re anything like me, an off-center circle can never be unseen and will slowly drive you mad.

It is handy though to have a few simple shapes saved as SVG for quick and dirty use.

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So for a cut, what settings do you use; or does it figure that out on its own?

For Proofgrade, you can populate the settings for the material in question by selecting the material (or auto-detecting the material). It will apply the cut settings automatically to an object that’s designed with a stroke and no-fill.

If non-Proofgrade, it’s going to depend on the material and you’ll have to test to see what works best. You can search around the forum for various material settings, or start with Proofgrade (if we talk too much about settings, we’ll prolly need to bump this over to Beyond the Manual).

You can do that. As @chris1 mentioned, you’ll have to visually align to center - the UI doesn’t have a snap to center or anything like that.

Using Illustrator verbiage, you can place your raster artwork (image) into the Illustrator file. When you go to save the SVG, just make sure the option to embed is selected. That way you can have your vectors and rasters all in one file and placed exactly how you want corresponding to one another.

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I plan to test this out with the proofgrade stuff at this point. Will give it a shot in the morning; having the roar of the unit running late at night does not go over well with the family during college exam week.

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