New to Lightburn and the Forum…so assuming user error or ignorance but we need a way forward and hope it’s soluble rather than a bug.
We have three small images grouped into one file. If we take the default Scan Angle of 0, then the scans are bottom to top across all three images.
But if we change the scan angle to 90 or 135 (vertically or diagonally), then it defaults to the equivalent of “Fill shapes individually”, scanning each separate image before proceeding to the next.
Does anyone know if
this is a feature and, therefore, not possible to change?..or
did we stumble onto a bug in Lightburn 1.4.00?..or
it’s a case of newbie ignorance and we just haven’t found the right setting?
Perhaps I misunderstand, but… If you have three shapes or images that are positioned horizontally and you choose 90º (vertical) it has to burn them one at a time.
I hope you can see the image I loaded. There are three sub-images in one LIGHTBURN file which is then loaded into Lightburn. When we set the scan to 0, the default, the scan is left-to-right, bottom-to-top, which is the default. But if we set the scan to be either vertical or diagonal, the scan takes place sub-image by sub-image…first one, then another, and finally the third…as if we had set the “Fill shapes individually” flag.
Yes, there are limits to how one fills the image. Can you share the reason for changing the angle of image mode scanning? What are you after, is this a type of artistic styling you want to achieve?
The image compositing engine only works on 90’s, since it’s unlikely to be used otherwise (at least, not intentionally) and the math is significantly harder.
We’re involved in setting up production runs that go for 4 1/2 hours AND we’re starting out with the Longer Ray5 10W system as a test bed for practicability.
There are three criteria involved that caused us to look into the scan pattern that I’ll outline in a moment.
The first is that our medium is a commercially available 4”x4” wood blank and we accidentally discovered that scanning vertically or diagonally produces a cleaner, sharper, darker image (when the grain is horizontal). Not sure why because we’re newbies to this endeavor so still learning the nuances.
The second is that we’ve had what appears to be tensioning problems with the belts on the Longer engraver with occasional double images in one portion of the engraving bed and what appears to be slips in the positioning drive. Both of these are intermittent and not reliably reproducible. Longer is writing and filming a technical video on achieving proper tensioning, which we hope will arrive next week. This issue, however, got us thinking that perhaps short non-engraving traverses might be less prone to glitching than long traverses.
The third is that, after reconfiguring to make use of the diagonal scanning, we also discovered a time savings. In a 4 hr and 22 minute run, we were able to shave off ten minutes to achieve a 4 hr and 12 minute run. That may not seem significant to some folks but in production, time savings become important.
So…that’s how we ended up stumbling onto the issue that I posited on the Forum. The scan pattern that we finalized, on our 12-part production run is shown in the following diagram. The nine images in the matrix on the left are single images, each of which will engrave on a 4x4 blank. Each of three groupings on the right is made up of three separate images, also burning onto 4x4 blanks.
Can you pre-composite the images before bringing it into LightBurn? That way LightBurn will work with as a single image. If you’re doing the same job repeatedly pre-composition doesn’t seem like it would be a problem.
