I am going to be purchasing a Boss LS-3655 soon, and have a question about Lightburn. For my application, I am running relatively simple files, but a large amount of them.
I will be loading these files in DXF format, which is all well and good, except I realize that it will be quite time consuming to manually select each part that I would like to cut and each part I would like to engrave. Especially with large files like the ones I will be running.
Is there an easy way to load files so that they will automatically have different layers that I can specify cutting/engraving all at once?
Would it work when importing a DXF with multiple layers? Or would it be better to have the lines be different colors in the DXF file itself and Lightburn would recognize this and place them in different layers automatically?
This is precisely the way LightBurn deals with different colors in your original artwork. LightBurn looks at the colors used and does a ‘best-match’, placing each color on a different layer. You can also have these layers pre-set to cut or engrave, with the correct power and speed settings applied automatically. Once setup, the combination of these features allows you to import and go with your projects, producing as you’d like, with the minimal number of steps to achieve.
@Rick just beat me to it!
As @Rick says LB will use the various entity colours and map them to the nearest LB layer colour (except for White which gets mapped to Black). Here’s a couple of screenshots:
Not quite. LB completely ignores layers in the DXF and only looks at the colour. However if the entity’s colour is set to ‘ByLayer’ LB will look at the entity’s layer colour and use that to determine which LB layer to put it on. So for example you might have two layers in your CAD system: One called ‘Cut’ and another called ‘Engrave’. If you set the ‘Cut’ layer to be white (or Black) and the 'Engrave layer to be Red (or Blue or whatever) and put all your cut geometry on layer ‘Cut’ and all your engraving on layer ‘Engrave’ LB will put all your entities to be cut on layer C00 and all your engraving on layer C01 (or whichever layer most closely matches your CAD layer colour). Does that make sense?
