Hi
I’m starting to get into Lightburn and have a question.
I hope to use Lightburn to laser cut parts for model aircraft such as wing ribs etc. From balsa wood.
I would like to know if it is possible to edit a, less than perfect tracing, of an image to make it suitable for cutting?
It certainly is possible. I’ve recently used a hand-traced drawing of an orthotic insert for a shoe, traced it with that feature, then adjusted the design by removing nodes and smoothing others. The tracing was so bad that some of the nodes were millimeters apart, but deleting large blocks of nodes and smoothing the remainder resulted in a clean line for cutting. If you have long smooth curves as the objective, but the tracing generates less-than-ideal discontinuities, just pulling out (deleting) the nodes cleans it up.
‘Trace Image’ in LightBurn produces vector paths that can be edited using the ‘Edit Nodes’ tool, so for this part…yes. 
You also have some control over the smoothness of the trace within LightBurn to help with the vector path generation, in case you were not aware.
Would suggest reserving comment until we could “see” what this means. How “less than perfect” are we talking about? Can you gather better original artwork? How close to the original does your reproduction need to match? How complex are these “ribs”? Are you currently using a camera with LightBurn to capture these parts?
Can you use images as a starting point for cut designing? Yes. We have many users who do this quite frequently.
How smooth or challenging this workflow becomes is about the quality and complexity of your source material and the desired accuracy in reproduction you require. Without more information or an example… hard for us to offer a direct answer.
I think I may have some light on a solution to my issue. I am importing a pdf file of a scanned component so I’m seeing a double line on the trace (depicting the two edges of the printed line on the paper original drawing). I guess I should be importing a dxf file instead so I just get a single line. Does this make sense?
As far as I know, a dxf is a vector drawing anyway. So if you have a dxf, import that and you’ll have the actual parts drawings you are looking for. Play with the curve tolerance in the settings that will determine how many nodes are in a curve. If the tolerance is too low it will add many artifacts into your lines and curves. I have my curve tolerance at about .02 if memory serves.
Thanks for that. I’m now working on converting pdf files to dxf.
Thanks for that. I have now discovered for myself what you are suggesting. In fact I have found a whole section of the Lighburn documentation called Edit Nodes Tool. So Lightburn has it covered!
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.