Placing rotated rastered art near an edge

[jestelle]

Hi everyone,

I assume I’m like many of you, trying to use every last inch of a piece of nice proofgrade material. To do so I often position my next cut to take advantage of as much material as I can.

In doing so, I ran into an interesting problem.

When you rotate artwork, that includes a rastered (bitmap) image, the GFUI increases the bounding boxes of the artwork to capture the corners of the rastered image (even if it’s transparent). And in doing so, makes it much harder to place and print, because now there are non-printing regions going off the edge of the printable area, and it won’t allow it to be sent.

Here I demonstrate with the artwork from:

Free 8-Bit Sword/Knife

That’s taking 8-bit design really seriously!

With it’s regular orientation (or rotated 90º) the bounding box is tight with the artwork.

But rotated 45º or so, the bounding box gets big:

And here, although the artwork really is completely on my material and within the printable range, I can’t print, because the transparent corner of the rastered image if off the side of the print bed

Anyone have good strategies for dealing with this?

I see two options:

(1) Use a vector some how for the things I want to engrave… which at least for this art seems possible… but I’m not sure quite how do to do that and get the different grayscale values

(2) Rotate it in Illustrator to more closely match the rotation I want on the material, which will likely let me position it more closely to the edge where I want it. But this is a pain

So…

Any suggestions?

[Jules]

Slow down the speed. (And lower the power a bit to compensate.) Only way I’ve found to squish them in there effectively.

(Although you could just cut the board in half where all the cutouts are and put the smaller section in the middle.)

[rbtdanforth]

@jestelle

Any suggestions?

It is my guess that there are at least a few pixels that are not fully white. It will not make a lot of difference in the cut but the Gfui will still act on it,

If you can export the design and trim it to the minimal area that would be a start, If you brought it into Gimp and masked the design you could just make the rest white and export it as a png as a jpg will be squirrely where it is supposed to be white.

[jestelle]

@Jules

Slow down the speed.

Does slower speeds reduce the area that is grayed out on the side? That seems likely.

This helps in some cases, to get a little more space. But doesn’t really address the root challenge.

[jestelle]

@rbtdanforth

It is my guess that there are at least a few pixels that are not fully white.

I don’t think that’s the situation. If that were the case, I would expect the bounding box in my first screenshot would be bigger than the actual art.

[jeffreyp]

I’ve rotated and had the bounding box look like that while rotating but once I clicked off and back on again, it had shrunk to the size of the art itself and I was able to move it close to nest. I’m about 99.5% sure (but it is early and I haven’t retested it just yet).

I assume your bounding box stays that way? Though it may have been for vectors…

[kittski]

I had this very question a few years ago and I just couldn’t wrap my head around, so I had to make myself a visual. I think the only solution is to resave your artwork at the angle you want or moving the material away from the edge. I usually just use the premium line shape to whack off the chunk of material I want to use and then reposition it.

Help me understand the large margin when rotating a bitmap

This could be a rotation bug, but it’s most likely me not understanding what’s happening so I can fix it. Either way, it’s a huge pain when trying to place a PDF/SVG raster files in the GUI. The large image margin really limits things as they tend to fall outside the cut area. When I import a SVG or PDF containing both a bitmap and vector element, there is a large margin around the bitmap that I don’t understand. The second thing I don’t understand is how/why the margin expands the way it doe…

[jestelle]

Thanks @kittski
Your visual is helpful.

And while I understand why this happens, I’m still curious about solutions.

I wonder if you put the embedded image in a vector mask, if that would work, and solve this.

I think the GFUI does something smart with tightening up the bounding box when there are extra transparent background on a raster image. It just doesn’t seem to recompute that when you rotate the image. So maybe GF could fix it too.

[crkjelstrom]

Have you gone into your file in a photo editor to make sure there are no random pixels floating around? Or is your background white instead of transparent? Because this is what is happening.

If your background is white, it may still register as something to be engraved (even tho it won’t be engraved) so it counts it as part of the whole image. I recommend removing the background.

If it is already transparent, go back in and triple check with an eraser that there is nothing there at all. Even a small pixel in any corner will mess with you.

EDIT: masking won’t help. GF doesn’t recognize vector masks yet.

[o-o]

This is a known issue, as posted by kittski above.

It has to do with how they handle images when rotating. It will do it with any bitmap/raster, even those with true transparent backgrounds (in png.)

It has not been a priority for them to address, likely because so few have ever complained. If you post in Problems and Support, they can add your name to the list.

[jestelle]

Thanks @o-o

It wasn’t so hard for me to work around, but if I encounter this again some time, I’ll complain to support about it, at least to get myself put on that list

[rbtdanforth]

I solved it once but used snapmarks to rotate it and made a jig at 30 degrees,

If you rotate the image in Gimp and make the edges fit the object that will solve your issue as well.