I am still a bit new to the GF workflow. Let’s say I want to cut out a square after I have done a 3D engrave of something in the middle, but I want it to be really precisely in the middle, what’s the best way to do this?
For example, Canva is my go to application for raster type design creation, so I can do that and create a PNG or something to upload to the UI and set it to 3D engrave - easy enough. Likewise, I can use vectr.com, AI or Illustrator for the raster and set that to be cut.
HOWEVER, when I do the above steps, I am manually and visually aligning the two uploaded files with my eyes in the GF UI since they are separate files I have uploaded and moved around manually. Is there a reasonable way of doing both raster and vector in one program where I can do typical page-layout style alignment within that one program and export then only ONE file to the GF? I would think I would come into problems with how to assign “colors” in that program so that the GF would tease it out if one thing is raster/3D engrave and one is vector/cut.
Thanks and hopefully I’m missing something easy here that people do!
Wow, I feel like a dummy for not trying this first! I did this in AI, Inkscape and Vectr and indeed they do all seem to work well. So thank you.
Perhaps this is the start of a new post or shouldn’t be discussed here, but any other good apps do this type of raster/vector combo and play well with GF other than AI, Inkscape and Vectr? Ideally a free one?
Yup, that is my go-to as well. And If I have a 3D Obj I kick it to Blender (also free and very powerful) and do a Black to White “Blend” texture that will produce a nice vary power engraving.
I would be interested to hear more of what you’re talking about on this “blend” texture. For example, just as a test, I made this type of gradient in Inkscape:
But when I bring it into the GF, I get this warning:
Which makes sense actually. So if I were to do something like this, I guess I would need to rasterize it in Gimp, Photoshop, etc and then replace it back into inkscape and line it up before saving it back as an SVG right?
But again, that may not be what you are talking about so I’d be curious to hear what that process/outcome was.
At the core, you wouldselect the gradient object and convert it to a raster in inkscape, either by the “make a bitmap copy” or the “export as png” functions. I prefer to export as PNG becaue I have tighter control over the resolution and like to have the asset file separate from the svg.
In your example, you might want to do it this way so you can trim off the corners (if all you’re interested in is the oval), you wouldn’t want to spend the time engraving any space that you wont be using. That way you can use Gimp/etc to crop your image and make the portions you don’t want to engrave transparent so the laser will ignore them.
Then you would drag the resulting PNG back into inkscape and scale/align as you saw fit.
