I want to engrave a design and overlay another graphic so the bottom layer needs to be a lighter engrave. How do I differentiate the layers in Inkscape so I can set two power settings in Glowforge? (material is leather if that matters)
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The Glowforge interface distinguishes elements by color. If you assign different colors to different parts of your design you will be able to assign different settings. I suggest that you first test print your design on an inexpensive material like cardstock. Stacking engrave elements in the Glowforge interface is not as straight forward as one might expect.
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The other alternative would be to do a two tone raster engrave. Something like this. Here are two text elements in different shades of grey:
Now you can select all of that and “make a bitmap copy”:
… which at first looks like nothing changed, but if you drag your words to the side, you’ll see that it made an embedded raster version of your art:
It’s hard to tell, but on the right is an image and on the left are two text elements. I’ll select all to show you what I mean – look below and note the two selection boxes on the left side and only one on the right.
Now you can engrave your image using 3D engrave (aka vary power) and you’ll get two different tones.
For this design this has an advantage over the previous discussion of making two path elements with different colors: if you do it that way you’ll make two passes in separate engrave passes. If you do it my way with the rasterization you’ll get it all done in one pass. Depending on your design that can be a significant time savings.
Side note: Before doing any of this, be sure you go into preferences and set your export DPI to be high enough. I would suggest at least 300 DPI for good results. Here I am using 600 (highlighted blue):
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Thank you!
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Very thorough explanation. Thank you!
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Let us know how it turns out!!
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