Hey Everybody, total newb here. I have plenty of experience in other techy type crafts (3d printing/resin/cricut) but this is a whole new arena for me.
I purchased a set of runes in SVG format. The file shows cut lines as black and engraving as red. When I import into Glowforge the colors on the screen are cut lines = red and engraving = purple. I figured it was just something lost in translation so I decided to run it. It did what it was supposed to do but it definitely didn’t do it right.
I looks like it jusrt over etched the centers and lost all the detail. I assum this is because of the colors. please see images: .
Colors don’t get translated over to the GF interface - they only delineate steps - so I wouldn’t expect that to be the issue. From your images it looks like your SVG has a white shape in it that’s being interpreted as an engrave, that red area. Have you checked the files in whichever design software you usually use?
That file should have two components - an engrave area, and a surrounding cut path. The engrave could be vector or raster/bitmap.
The first thing I’ll point out is the engrave and cut don’t appear to be aligned correctly from the printed part, but do in the other images you posted.
As to why the center triangle is fully engraved, I am suspecting the engrave element is a vector that has some feature that is not parsing correctly. I would use your design app to convert it to raster/bitmap to be sure - and make it black (first) so it will engrave correctly. Colored bitmaps engrave at varying power settings.
Finally, what settings did you use? You may need to back off on power, or increase speed, so they’re not as heavily engraved (burned). Knowing how to use custom settings is pretty much essential.
My take on it (guessing) is that it’s pure vector that was designed for print. That is, it’s a solid red triangle with a white “negative space” vector shape on top.
I’d have to see the source file to be sure but I’d suspect you’d (OP) just need to do a difference or exclusion on the white shape and the red triangle.
Converting to raster is the quick solution and will probably work but has some downsides. Vector editing is powerful but it takes some practice to see tricks like this.
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