I am trying to create an engraving with a design that is drawn out in Illustrator using the brush tool. Everything looks great, but like when you don’t combine your text I am getting the un-engraved sections where lines meet.
I am sure there is a very simple solution and I have search the community posts hitting dead ends. Would someone be able to help me walk through this and what needs to be done for Glowforge to recognize they are together?
Hi there, did you try to unite feature listed under the pathfinder tool in Ai? Once you have your text complete in illustrator use Ctrl+Shift+O to create an outline of the text. Then go to the pathfinder tool and click on Unite. That should do the trick.
I did try that. It’s not really text. Here is a picture and it’s three lines combined.
If it is a single line you are trying to engrave you should use “Score” instead “Engrave” to get the results you are looking for.
If you are getting a “negative” where two objects meet, you need to “Union” the objects into one object. (I use Inkscape, so not sure what it is called in AI.)
This sounds like you have overlapping shapes that you’re trying to engrave.
When Glowforge sees overlapping shapes, they actually invert the engrave and you get something like this:
Is that what you’re seeing?
If so, there’s a few ways to fix this in Illustrator, but if you’re really looking to engrave you should just Rasterize your art before you send it to GFUI to engrave. When you do that, you’ll more confidently get an engraving of what you see on your screen.
That said, if you’re really just making lines, you may be better off scoring them… but we’d need to know more about what you’re doing to give you advice there.
Good luck! Let me know if you have more questions.
YES! This is exactly what I am doing/seeing.
I just did the rasterize and it looks like that may solve my issue. I will try this once I can get home to the machine.
Thank you all!
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