I wanted to try doing a 3D type etch using greyscale imaging with the new walnut I got. I decided to make a school crest for my daughter who’s a bit of a Potter fan. I started with a design I found online and fist did an auto-trace in illustrator. Then I started breaking out the individual animals into separate objects so I could layer them over some backgrounds (easier for me to work with and update later than just filling in holes around them). Then I worked on some background textures for the four quadrants of the crest.
I finally had something that should at least look interesting so I grabbed a piece of the new walnut proofgrade material and warmed up the forge to see how it worked. The first try I didn’t set it to use enough power for what I was hoping so I stopped it and started a new one with more power. I also added a new score line to surround the crest. It was looking better so I let it run.
Very nice work. Good design and ideas. I could stay busy for a month just using that ProofGrade walnut churning out earings all day. It’s pretty sweet.
Ah this is great! I know so many people who would kill to have one of these! Awesome
I’m not new to illustrator, but was always more of a Photoshop junkie back in the day. Now that I have a glowforge that’s changed. Trace is the greatest function!
Every time I get a bit critical about the resolution on an engrave, there’s always a zoom out photo for scale down the page a bit that completely blows me away!
Very nice!! Question on the color scaling (greyscaling). In the drawing the snake, eagle,badger and lion are solid medium grey(gray?). In the finished work (which looks great btw) their bodies dont seem much darker (if at all) from the wood tone (esp. looking at the lion in the pic). Were these lightly engraved or do you think the masking lightens it even more? ( that is if you did the animal engravings on that wood w/o masking would there be more contrast?)
It could also just be the photo, my monitor, etc. and show more contrast in person ( I’m quite sure like moth projects shown here, it looks even more fantastic in person).
I just realized you’re a beta not pre , so disregard the questions (sorry) - maybe @dan or one of the pre-release users could answer or let us know if greyscale is still being updated as we “type”.
Very nice! 30ish years ago, I woodburned family crests for both sides of my family. Redoing them on the Glowforge was one of the first project ideas I had. Can’t wait to give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
Oh yes, quite a bit! We have tons of work to improve these even further. Honestly, the team working on engraving looks at these and flinches, because we see all the stuff we are still working on doing. But we’re pretty picky.
