Advice on design and software

[Tokraspy (Mark Evans)]

I’ve been trying to find out how to do these frame work edges within Lightburn and adjust I’m hitting a wall and I was wondering if somebody could give me some advice on how you do this sort of cutting have included a few images to let you know the sort of thing I’m trying to achieve any help would be really appreciated thank

[Tokraspy (Mark Evans)]

[Tokraspy (Mark Evans)]

Please ignore the daybreak picture. It’s the border in the pictures two and three

[berainlb (PY)]

What exactly is the complication? Not clear what the problem is.

[Tokraspy (Mark Evans)]

My problem is that I don’t know how to design that sort of framework into Lightburn so that it will cut that out or is it some sort of template file you download and then can importing to do the scrollwork

I’m so new at it that I still have the new car smell as such

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[berainlb (PY)]

You’re going to have a bit of a journey ahead of you so just be prepared for it.

At a high level you’ll have 3 basic approaches to this… and you can seamlessly move among these different models:

1. take pre-existing designs and import them into LightBurn to burn as-is or with various levels of aggregating or modifying; this is probably the easiest way to start and to learn
2. create the design outside of LightBurn and then import into LightBurn. The more elaborate the design the more likely it will be that a formal illustration tool will make those designs easier
3. create the design directly within LightBurn

For the moment let’s focus on doing this in LightBurn. There’s no magic to this. You’ll need to explore the various tools to see what they do and how they can be leveraged to give you the effect that you want. Basically all the tools related to drawing and position will be in the toolbars on the left and top of the screen. All the laser controls on the right of the screen are not so relevant at design time.

My suggestion would be to hover over each tool and read the tooltip that pops up. It will give you a basic understanding of how they work. The documentation is also a good starting point.

A simple first project you could do is to make a lattice shape of squares. This is essentially the same principle as the frame that you showed, just with a different complexity.

1. Draw one small square
2. Use the array tool to create duplicates across X and Y
3. Draw a circle around all of them encapsulating them

See what happens when you change the cut mode of that layer from line to fill. Turn on Window->Filled/Smooth to make it more obvious. Try moving some of the boxes around. What happens?

Try this for different shapes and attempt increasingly complex shapes. You’ll eventually get proficient at the tools and how to accomplish certain features.

Try to enjoy the experience and reach out for help as you hit them or else you’ll just end up getting frustrated.