I am trying to place a shape, offset, of a logo on a design of a flag and weld them. There are lines within the flag that are showing being open and I cannot get them closed. I have watched videos and read quite a bit in this forum and tried everything, but I still cannot get them closed. I have done, break apart, join, auto join, node editing. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
flag.lbrn2 (291.9 KB)
Your design has duplicate shapes
It looks like you built your flag from scratch - nothing wrong with that - and the lines you used are not playing nicely.
I suggest you build the flag from shapes. I’ll show you one way… let me get some design done and I will post what I did.
First - isolate the emblem, select the emblem and delete the duplicated shapes
Isolate the star field - these are already made of shape and not made of lines. select all the stars and group them together
…edited … see below
I did do it from scratch.
Thank you for any help you can provide.
I grouped the stars together.
Doing the offset of the flag got me an outline of the outer flag, but no lines/stripes.
edited for better understanding
It will take me a minute to finish. Please stand by a bit longer. I assume you are trying to get this effect.
That is.
Thank you.
Rough draft of what I expect you need.
There are multiple excercises involved. Let us tackle the flag first.
What is the medium you are engraving on? Wood plaque?
I am engraving on wood
1st - lay out a rectangle on frame layer that is the size of your material.
I moved the design off of the grid for now, so I don’t have the grid lines in the background.
I made one 15"x8", and put the stars (already bunched into a group) in the right place. Make those two items another group.
Ok. Got that.
Make one bar across the bottom - then we will use the ARRAY function to perfectly fill the flag with 13 bars - we will work out the color in a few steps.
Im following you so far
For visual effect, I changed the colors so we can see the basic layout. The laser will not put out colors on wood. It can be darkened, lightened and direction of engrave changed to make an effect.
Grab the whole flag and press “P” to center it on your workplace. Turn off the BLUE layer. Grab the emblem, group it by itself, change it to another color - I will use grey.
Offset it at .2 inches - outer shapes only. Set the outline aside and CTRL+D duplicate the outline
Place the outline over the red bars where you want the emblem to be. The outline is a very small bit larger than the emblem, you will want to experiment with the size to get the effect you want.
How did you get the bars to not go through the stars?
Select each bar one at a time and use the grab handle to shorten them.
Press SHIFT and left click on the red layer in the LAYERS/CUTS window - that will select all things on that color. GROUP the red bars together.
While red bars are selected, press CTRL and click on the grey outline.
Press CTRL+B to open the Boolean tools assistant. Hover over each option to preview the results. Click on the button that matches. Now you have cookie cutter punch out for your emblem - but this is only on the red layer.
Grab the extra gray outline and move it to fill the cut out. Then turn off the red layer and turn on the blue layer. Repeat the BOOLEAN steps to cookie cutter the blue lines. Turn the red layer back on
Now grab the emblem and put it in the cookie cutter hole.
Again, rough draft but this is what I end up with
Make sure you have these buttons ON
Got it!
Thank you for your help!
Depending on your wood, you may want to engrave the stars… or engrave the background around the stars.
If you leave the stars proud, unburned, you can also leave every other stripe in the flag unburned. But you will want to engrave the blue field behind the stars
If you engrave the stars, you will want to leave the blue field un-engraved and engrave the white stripes.
Use the preview button, alot. Spread out the line interval and change the engrave angle to give a different shade. Practice on cheap scraps.
Happy to help you learn the LB logic.
