Hi there, we recently bought a GlowForge machine and are yet to use it. It’s all set up and I’m laying out a project to be cut and am wondering if there are some shortcuts that you guys know about that would help expedite this process.
I work for an architectural firm and we use Revit to draft all of our projects. Since Revit is a 3D drawing program, in the past when we’ve sent files out to print from outsourced laser cutting companies I have had to draw basic lines, making for example GREEN lines over the parts I want to be cut and blue lines over the parts I only want etched. Is this how I should set up files to print with the GlowForge as well or what’s the quickest way I can communicate to the machine what I’d like it to cut out and what to etch? See attached PDF of an example file I had cut for us by another company and please let me know how best to proceed as I’m working on laying this out now and am hoping to send it to print this afternoon! Speak to you soon.
yes, this should work fine for the GF. you can even export to a PDF just like this to print from. Which colors you use aren’t important, just make sure you assign a color to each operation type you want. each color will show up as an operation in the GFUI, and then you can assign what you want to do with that color. so in your example, you will see a green operation that you can assign to be cut, score, or engrave, and a blue operation that you can cut, score, or engrave. you can assign both as the same type of operation with different settings as well.
I had my GUI open so I opened your file just to give you a preview. It works just fine except for the scale. If you want to maintain the size, I suggest breaking the image up a so you don’t have to shrink it to fit the bed.
The top picture is how it opened up with no changes to your file. The second one I resized to fit. The cut and score lines came in just fine though.
Thank you for taking the time to show me that. The drawings that I attached was after I did all the line work re-drawing so it may not have been the best example. In order to save time, is the GlowForge able to read regular black lines which I could assign to cut or etch once in the glowforge program. Here’s an example of something that I’m wondering if I could just have the glowforge read as is and then I could assign cut lines and etch lines once in the glowforge software, instead of having to edit/redraw all the lines as specific colors beforehand. Let me know when you can and thank you again.
the GF interface (which is browser-based, not an actual application or print driver) cannot edit files. it will read colors that are in the original files and you can create operations based on those colors. if the strokes in your PDF are all black, they will all come through as one operation and you won’t be able to assign different operations (cut/etch/score).
you’ll need to open that PDF in a program like Illustrator (or other vector design program) and change the stroke colors. or you’d need to be able to assign those stroke colors in Revit before exporting to a PDF.
^^what @shop said.
The GUI will interpret all the black lines the same, so you would have to have two different colored lines; one for engraving and one for cutting.
Good luck with your projects!
How the GUI sees your image. (Of course, the example you posted was a raster image so it can only be engraved.)
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