Since there are more and more galvo lasers only working with GRBL without the function of 3D sliced engraving, it would be nice to see this option (or something similar) be available.
By rasterizing the images into layers it would “vectorize” the image into layers according to the depth/darkness of the image.
This way you can get a multi-layer depth map where you can set the amount of layers in depth you want. With each pass the power and speed will stay the same, but every passing the lighter parts of the image will be skipped until only the darkest part will be engraved.
This type of engraving will leave less soot on the material but will engrave deeper, even with blue-light diode lasers. But the problem with blue-light diode laser is that with the regular grayscale engraving, the material will get really dark.
Diodes have extremely good power linearity, and you’re generally just engraving wood or plastic, so use ‘Grayscale’ mode - that’s what it’s for.
Grayscale mode does not work well for deep, consistent metal removal for galvos, so 3D slice was added for those machines. It was not “removed” for diodes and CO2 systems, as they already have the grayscale mode to accomplish this.
3D sliced feature for diode lasers are really effective when using the galvo style lasers. It would be so much easier to 3D engrave with doide lasers this way.
The depth is huge without a lot of soot.
It is a combined 20W diode + 20W fiber galvo laser.
This wooden slab took 10 hours according to the person in the video. But depending on the depth, it could take a few minutes to hours. It is also able to 3D slice in brass and other metals as well.
According to Oz, the grayscale option does this. How is the photo done? Using their software?
I see your photo, and suggest you ask them how to do this. Mostly they don’t and/or won’t tell you. I’ve seen lots of these types of images, and with some, no one has ever been able to duplicate it even when the settings are supplied.
I’m confident Oz understands how these machines work, grayscale is better with a diode. He had to write the 3dslice routines because the fiber works differently.
You can go search the feature suggestions and see if you find it there. But if the developers have an existing working equivalent, I doubt there will be much motivation.
As the link to the YouTube video, you can see how it is done. It is done by using a depth map like the ones for a fiber laser. This is done with their own software and a blue diode laser. But how it is done by watching the YouTube video closely, I noticed it is done the same way as a fiber laser does. It engraves by creating vectorized layers of the depth map. Eventually it will gradually skip the lighter parts of the depth map and goes deeper to the darker areas.
If LightBurn would implement this feature, it would only subtract the threshold of an amount of the grayscale for each pass. Something like this:
But to do this, I need to manually add up to 256 images and make it rotate a few degrees for each pass to uniformly engrave in wood.
So it would mean the threshold function with multiple passes and a variable threshold value.
