Hello!
I am currently in the process of cutting out pieces for a bridge that is supposed to be used for a model train track.
I have already drawn the shape of the bridge in scale 1:1 and taken a picture of it. When tracing the images in LightBurn however, the lines are not that straight and instead a little wobbly. I’ve already played around with the sliders but it doesn’t seem to get that much better. Is there anything I can improve? Or will I have to resort to designing this entire thing in LightBurn myself? I don’t have any experience with that yet.
If you’re intending to cut these pieces out, you’ll likely want to delete the inside lines created by the trace altogether.
You can use “Optimize selected shapes” in the Edit menu to smooth out the lines a bit. You’ll see options to smooth shapes or fit them to lines or arcs. Smoothing and fitting to arcs/lines could help to clean up a lot of the wobbliness.
There is also an Optimize option in the Trace Image tool itself.
The Edit Nodes tool is another option for cleaning up the design, although that will require more manual effort.
To learn how to design this from scratch, I’d start with looking over our documentation on Shape Creation tools:
Lightburn cannot “Center Trace”, which is why you get 2 lines. Wobbling is due to both your original and not precis enough adjustment.
By such simple constructions as your bridge, it is an obvious case to draw it in Lightburn. It’s quick as you can draw it on paper and it’s not that hard to make either.
