I am surrounded by geeks, nerds and dweebs. I fully expect a game of D&D to break out in some backroom thread any time.
And yes, I’m not complaining, I’m very impressed.
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I only have experience with the GFUI and the Universal Control Panel, and the UCP isn’t any better for it, IMO. Probably less so. Unless I don’t know how to use it very well, which is entirely possible.
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Oh, how fun!
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Very cool. I’ve said before the GF had a standard set of colour to settings this sort of thing would be much easier (as would circulating designs in general).
THough maybe in this case that is an unreasonable request, because you need 20 versions of a score I suppose.
It is possible to embed meta data into SVG files - wouldn’t it be cool if you could do that for GF??
Really like what you are doing there, I have two settings score and wide score, but never as many as you must have had for this.
I think there is a huge opportunity for more computer assisted artwork and a laser.
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Wow, very impressive!
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I just realized that the same principle could be done with the voronoi result, instead of length of path, I can apply the same concepts to the circles according to their radii.
I’ll probably update the php to handle that. (He says, not at all sure what that looks like.)
Ages ago I did a proof of concept with a custom halftone using tiled clones. I could apply the line weight concept there too and would probably get interesting results. Aha here we go:
I wonder if tiled clones combined with turning on scaling line weight would let you get even closer to the desired end result. Hmm.
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With my Lasersaur system, you could leave text in the SVG and it would read the settings from that. The text was something along the lines of specifying the RGB value of a line, then the power, speed, and focus to assign.
It was REALLY nice to have that available, as I could bake the settings in to a file and know that if I return to it years later I just make minor adjustments for variations in material (I would name the files themselves to include type and thickness of material)
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Interesting, and not a bad idea.
Even if GF wanted to keep the “colors” method, it would in theory be fairly easy to work out a color to settings mapping a bit like our current saved settings UI. It would require that you know and preset your colors and whatnot, so your text option is a whole lot more intuitive.
My take on settings being embedded in the file was always a bit of “eh”, because it seemed like it wasn’t any easier than doing it in the UI. The text method you describe is a great deal more user friendly than all that, so I’m into it.
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very nerdy and very cool
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I think it could be done maybe a few ways and done in such a way that it would be an advanced user thing.
Maybe something as easy as naming elements in the design software, and if those element names match saved settings, it applies the saved settings.
Or you could have a script that searches the SVG file and does some kind of find/replace with the color code and inserts S=, P=, etc.
They DO have a way a doing it, I’m pretty sure, since the PG designs can utilize the score function automatically. I’m pretty sure they are using a custom namespace in the SVG for that.
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This describes the system in Lasersaur. I forgot they didn’t have a variable focus height in the build, so it wasn’t included in the LaserTags system. But they also let you specify the order of operations for the various cuts.
A system like this would be fantastic on Glowforge, since text isn’t processed as an engraveable element anyway. For simple jobs with one or two settings to dial in, this is pointless. But for things like material test grids, where you have 100+ different settings to program, this would be a godsend.
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Trust you to come up with this!!! I think you misspent your youth not as a genius… 
Seriously, This is on another level of thinking!
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Eesh, you are doing it wrong if you need 100 
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So I did separate out the circles by radius, I haven’t thrown it in the laser to see what can be done with it. Someone else want to do it?
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I will print it if you give me suggested settings for draftboard - how should I adjust the focus height.
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Kind of up to you, really. What I did was to remove the tray and elevate it so the top surface was almost exactly the height of the tray. I wanted to maximize the effect, which is a 0.5" spread of focal heights. I just figured out how many different colors I had and did the math with a linear spread, so like if you had 6 layers, you could do 0.01, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5" heights.
Of course you could also decide that you’d rather that not be linear, and get slightly different visual effects. You’re the artist 
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I am printing it now on two color cardstock. I think I have the score setting wrong, but we’ll see. My actual focus height is .125, so I am using that as well as .175, .225, and .250. I am getting some stuttering in the head movement.
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Cool. I started trying this on cardstock, but decided that I needed to use a material that took laser very well. That left me looking at either cork or mahogany, because both of them engrave a nice dark color with surprisingly little laser power applied. I’d imagine that draftboard/mdf would work well too and moderate power levels.
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Well, the cardstock doesn’t show enough contrast as I printed it, but with some fiddling I know I could get some interesting results. I printed in separate phases - 4 prints adjusting the focus height for each element. Total print time about 24 minutes.
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Oh that’s a pretty cool result.
You can manually override that to do it in one job if you try it again.
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