On the mysterious countersinks

Just be careful that none of them get ahold of the marker with the color designated for “burn mercilessly”

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The only way you could tell the software “Make a 45 degree angle in this solid color region, lowest along edge X” would be with Proofgrade. Anything else and the software will not know how much less material it removes at any reduced power.

Gradients/Greyscale will be what does your bevel style engraves. You figure out what power/speed combination gives you the deepest cut you want, and what gives you the shallowest you want, then tell it to use those two settings at the lightest and darkest in a region. It will move in a linear fashion between those values, and if the material is reasonably consistent, you will have a smooth transition/slope.

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You don’t need proofgrade materials for that to work. As long as the material is fairly consistent and you have measured the power and speed settings required for a complete cut, the software can determine how to do various partial cuts via interpolation.

Another way to look at it is that the solid colours would simply indicate to the software “generate a linear grayscale gradient between these edges and raster it”. It’s just a shortcut to save us manually creating the gradients by hand - nothing magical is happening.

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I mean you would need proofgrade to simply tell the software “give me a 45 degree angle here”

They could write the software to allow for gradient cuts in solid color fills, but that would be a pretty specific use case. Since it also overlaps with greyscale engraving, it is fairly likely that the end answer will be: Figure out your power levels (needed in either method) and then just fill with a gradient (potentially tricky in some file design software for odd contours, granted).

Yes… the Glowforge team can work out how to make the gradients themselves. But that does require some number of man hours to do (even if an opensource code base is available which can generate gradients on any given contour), and so people need to lobby for the feature and convince them it is worth those man hours.

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