Tweaking techniques

Made on a Glowforge
#1

Fiddling with different techniques…this is a 3D engrave on PG med clear acrylic. Filled the engrave (which is beautifully amazing) with Unicorn Spit red (sparkling) paint and then clear UV resin. Intense painting…with a tiny brush. If the image were much smaller, it would be fairly impossible to do by hand. This is about 3" H x 2"W. All the photogenic dust motes and fingerprints compliments of the house.

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I leaned it up against my smaller edge lit light of acrylic…which has given me some further ideas

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39 Likes
#2

Very nice!

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#3

Lovely!

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#4

If you defocus the engrave it’ll be smoother, without all the visible lines, which might be easier to paint too.

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#5

Am I the only one who expected dance tutorials?

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#6

Har de har…you’re thinking of twerking…not tweaking!

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#7

Ya…I know. It’s still something I need to try. I need to search to find out exactly how to do it…but, one of these days, soon.

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#8

You set the “focus height” setting for the engrave to something bigger or smaller than the material thickness. Here’s 1/8" acrylic engraved with a focus height of 1/4".

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#9

Is the 270 dpi in the defocussed sample the same for SD engrave, too? What effect is the defocus vs a reasonably high DPI? Any idea?

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#10

Yes, the SD Graphic preset is also 270 LPI. I’ve not tried very high LPI on clear acrylic because that doubles or triples the job length, where defocusing does not add any time.

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#11

Gorgeous! It’s so cool how the light highlights the lower edge of each petal and makes it look more rounded.

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#12

Yep… Bifocals can make life more interesting…

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#13

Great! Thank you, Dan. I’ll give it a try this afternoon. Time for me to stop being lazy. :slightly_smiling_face:

#14

I love how just a simple engrave looks on clear acrylic. I wonder if you can you mix a bit of the unicorn spit in with the resin and fill with that? UV resin is pretty finicky, I guess.

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#15

Love the 3D effect!

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#16

Gorgeous!

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#17

Gonna have to try this

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#18

You have that dialed in.

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#19

I was thinking the same thing, actually. Would make application twice as easy. It’s all in the experimentation game…so will probably give it a try. Stay tuned.

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#20

So…Dan…what if I use thick acrylic on 3D engrave? Would I need to set focus up to .75…or would I go the other direction…down to .625?

2 Likes