THE 3D Engrave

I agree that it looks unbelievably good; will be nice to see the feature rolled out to betas to see what people can do with it. This will be awesome for super fine work; you’ll still need CNC for a natural wood finish, though, I suspect.

3 Likes

It looks nice. It’s not any better or worse than you can get with a Trotec or ULS. Wood is by nature a low definition medium. Bas relief engraving at 1000dpi or higher would be pointless in wood, it would look the same but take 6x longer.

1 Like

Common it’s also cut from a half inch piece of wood! One of my major pros for a cnc instead of a Glowforge was the extra wood thickness. This kind of nullifies that fact.

4 Likes

Absolutely–it took my breath away. Makes me more eager than ever to get my hands on the machine. I’m even experimenting with creating depth maps (thanks @takitus for your link on that).

14 Likes

aye, but id have to pay 3-5x the amount for one of those, and i just cant afford it. (theyre overpriced if you ask me). I also use quite a number of different materials in my builds beyond wood (acrylics, tooling foams/boards, etc), so I plan on making quite a bit of use out of the 3d engrave function.

7 Likes

That probably won’t be easy to do on initial production machines. Dan has said that linear depthmap gradients translate to very nonlinear depth cuts, and that a lot of fiddling with the Photoshop curves function is needed. He never really said whether or not he was able to achieve anything near a planar sloping cut. Plus, on any material that is not homogeneous, it will be very unlikely to be possible at all.

2 Likes

I could’t agree more. This was the one feature that i had been waiting to see for some time now.

I’m guessing you are really going to want to use the lowest resolution possible that shows the detail you need. i would bet the time needed to engrave at 1300 dpi is considerably longer then 350 dpi.

4 Likes

Ah, OK. I think I understood enough of those polysyllabic words to not expect this feature. Does not diminish the beauty of the engraving at all.

3 Likes

But on the positive side, they have lots of time to fine tune that feature!

1 Like

Must be my old eyes – what is the last word in their motto?

Home of Laser ???

Seems blurred out on both the graphic and wood versions. I know its a depth-of-field artifact of the photograph (not a poor engrave)-- I’m just curious.

2 Likes

Beams

4 Likes

That seriously kicks more ash than anything that has ever kicked ash before!

7 Likes

Also it’s pretty easy to cover laser joints with veneer (or heck, paint, but very few laser product sellers seem very interested in undertaking such finish work.

3 Likes

Yep, I see “Home of Laser Beams” too.

2 Likes

Yeah, it’s Beams, but it ought to be Dreams.

(Change that up will 'ya guys?) :wink:

13 Likes

Thanks!

2 Likes

Yeah. Nice marketing material - Lets see a video of that printing out, and what the result looks like.Then I’ll believe that it can do that without a lot of hand holding.

The same way even the trace functionality still has work that needs to be completed (no compensation for height), this is something that was one of the major attractors to the product, and over a year since the machine went on for sale, we have not seen a single demonstration of this.

At this point seeing is believing.

2 Likes

nah, I dont want dreams, I want laser beams!

4 Likes

This is the kind of thing I’m really look forward to.

1 Like

ive seen trace in person. @dan said hes going to upload a video (maybe today) of the 3d engrave happening.

9 Likes