A question about LightBurn behavior. I made a “coin” that I am going to use as a sort of business card. I got the idea from The Louisiana Hobby Guy video. It cuts out the empty space in the coin and the text is what remains. I’m using the settings below.
I created a virtual array of 32 coins. When I first started burning, the laser swept across the material burning (what seemed like) a row of dots at a time. As it got above a row of coins, it seemed to be moving over the space between coin rows as if it was burning something.
I remembered reading about Flood Fill, so I stopped it. Checked off flood fill in the advanced tab, then started over. This time it seemed like it was doing one coin at a time. It has been running for a long time. Would it have been better if I did not flood fill? It s working fine, I am just curious about the best way to do this. Thanks!
Instead of using Flood Fill, this is looks like a good case for using ‘Fill groups together’, and making sure the graphics of your individual coins are grouped together. Flood Fill may behave similarly to ‘Fill Groups Individually’ in this case, but may also jump around a bit more - that brings a risk of gaps/misalignment if your machine isn’t well tuned.
A good habit to get into is to always Preview your jobs before running them - the Preview window will display an estimated job time. You can set different Fill modes and compare estimated times and the paths the job will take, before running your job. This is also very useful for catching design errors or other unexpected behaviors before starting.
Thanks, I didn’t think of that. I was more curious as to why it seemed like the beam was printing on the blank spaces between rows. The objects are grouped. so, if I select “fill groups together” it will etch all layers on the current object before moving to the next ?
Did it just seem like the laser was firing in space that should have been blank, or did it definitely fire and leave a mark? If it’s firing, there could be stray graphics I’m not seeing in the screenshot you’ve shared, or the engraving could be misaligning over time - is everything else lined up correctly?
With ‘Fill groups together’ selected, it will etch grouped sections of Fill layers together. If you enable ‘Order By Group’ in your ‘Cut Optimization Settings’, it will Fill and also Cut grouped graphics before moving on.
No, it was over blank space with zero power. That is what it looked like, anyway.
I will try your suggestions. Thanks! After six hours, I he to stop it (I sleep in the same room). One issue is that I have to make two passes on lower power because on higher power, details are burned. I’m going to try a better air assist. Maybe it will work on a single pass.
