My girlfriend was really curious about how well the glowforge handled grayscale engraving, so we wanted to try to see if we could get everything into one file and how that would work out. Can it do vector and raster in one file? Turns out it works great!
Here is the original drawing she made that I took a photo of and pulled into illustrator
I applied a compound masking path to it and copied the path to serve as the cut line to give it a bit of a border
I saved it as an SVG, imported it to the GF UI and it engraved the drawing in greyscale mode as it would if you imported an image otherwise, and then cut it out. No hitches.
These types of projects (engraved illustrations essentially “die cut”) are one of my favorite projects for the Glowforge. Maybe more so because I could not draw to save my life! Very nice!
This is amazing and makes me very excited about some of my projects. I’m not nearly as talented as your girlfriend, but I have a number of drawings that I want to convert over to engraves when I get my forge. It sounds like it will be a fairly painless experience.
