Circles on a Curved Mug

[baricl1317 (Loren Baric)]

If your doing a design with a circle on a curved mug the circle may look oblong because of the way our eyes work. The way to correct that is to make the design oblong in Lightburn. Here’s how to do that:

Measure the top of the mug near where the design will be and move the decimal point over one to the left. Then add that dimension to the width of the design, now the circle will look visually correct when burned.

Example:
My design was 58.7mm x 58.7mm
The top of my mug measured 87.0mm
So i added 8.7mm to the width of my design

58.7mm

+8.7mm

=67.4mm
The design will look oblong in Lightburn.
But visually it will look correct when viewed straight on on the mug.

This method is not perfect and you may have to adjust this formula but the circle now looks much better visually even though it is stretched.

A little more testing and at least on the mug i was using the stretch needed was a little less than 10%. More like 8% for the best results. Easiest to do this in lightburn before you rotate your design to place it on the mug correctly. The larger your circle the greater the stretch needs to be.

[misken (Melvin)]

I don’t know if you are talking about this, but there is something called “taper warping”, where LB has a tool integrated already:

[baricl1317 (Loren Baric)]

I’ve seen that but I don’t know that taper warping would help with the circle issue. You would still get the same visual effect of printing a circle on a round surface.

[Rick (Technical Evangelist)]

Thank you for this contribution.

@baricl1317

but I don’t know that taper warping would help with the circle issue.

Easy enough to try yourself and check the results. Here, I pair a circle with parallel boxes to show the results of ‘Taper Warp’ on an ellipse.

[baricl1317 (Loren Baric)]

Ill give it a try if that is in my version

[Rick (Technical Evangelist)]

Did you get the results you were after? Was ‘Taper Warp’ helpful in producing as you described? Any updates would be great.

[baricl1317 (Loren Baric)]

I am on version 1.4 in LB and it doesn’t look like I have Taper Warp.

[Rick (Technical Evangelist)]

Ah, yes. We released and made available in LightBurn 1.5 and higher. If you want to check it out, you continue to have the option to update to version 1.6 as I see from your license key.

[baricl1317 (Loren Baric)]

Thank you. I’ll look at updating when i have some free time. I worked in application support for 33 years and I know how things can go south when you try to update software. Old bugs get fixed and new bugs rear their ugly head. But thanks for the heads up. I appreciate it