Not sure i can explain it well, but general idea is this - i have had autotraced designs dropping elements because they were closed shapes, but were not supposed to fall out (be standalone element), not connected. Difficult to catch by eye.
Is it possible to make some sort of warning system to warn me if stuff inside outermost border is a standalone object ?
Something like this:
Fig.1, simple shape, where middle falls out.
Fig.2 where middle shape welded in and only quadrants fall out
Fig.2 where welding has been overlooked/missed and middle square becomes standalone object within outer boundary of outer shape.
This is very oversimplified example, but when very complex shapes concerned it would help.
Probably not quite what you have in mind but a little in the right direction you will find in the measuring tool.
The green color represents âwhole shapesâ (or individual elements).
Try to see if it could help you in the future plus there is of course a lot of other good information in this tool.
Problem is if youâre dealing with a fine detail and thousands of closed shape elements. So either you run a cut, which takes ages to run (expensive run time wise and may be material wise) or spend loads of time scrutinising every single polygon in the shape in mind of âwill it fall out wont it fall outâ.
If you select the outer border, LightBurn has a âSelect contained shapesâ function. Iâm not sure if that serves your needs though - your Fig 2 has 4 internal things within the outer square, and Fig 3 has the inner circle, and a square within that.
We actually do have an object sorting mechanism that generates a full tree of the âwhat is contained by whatâ in a job, so Figure 1 & 2 would have all shapes at the root level, and Figure 2 would be:
Circle: (contains)
Inner square
Itâs not exposed anywhere, but we do generate that info when we make a job. Iâm having a tricky time picturing how we could present that in a useful way that wouldnât be really time consuming to code.
That said, if you have âCut inner shapes firstâ enabled, and preview, it will do any isolated inside shape first. If youâre not expecting the job to have any, that would be a dead giveaway.
Any way to display cut preview of ârootâ objects in different colours maybe ? Option to switch it on on preview panel. At the moment all the cut/engrave is previewed as black line.
Iâd have to do that a different way (IE through a different viewer, possibly). The preview sends all moves through the simulation engine, and draws the moves that come out the other end, and thereâs not a direct link to the shapes in your original design at this point - Theyâve been converted to segments, optimized, rasterized, kerf-offset, tabbed, etc - thereâs no 1:1 correlation really possible, though I should have a back-link to the source shape.
We have another tool thatâs purely internal at this point that could work, intended for debugging the inner/outer sorting, but it doesnât have any custom rendering with it.
Iâm not saying no, but this is not high priority, as youâre quite honestly the first person whoâs ever asked for anything like this, and it would be of relatively limited use, unless someone convinces me otherwise. We have a few other fish to fry for the moment.
I never expected a quick âfixâ anyway. Somehow i always stumble upon rarified problems in my works and just ask if/how possible it is.
In my case i had some autotraced hand drawn works dropping out bits that are part of the design. I understand the logic of how this works, but when processing artsy stuff sometimes logic and common sense fails
The âshow drop outâ would be a nice thing to have, but not, as you say, essential at this point.
Ok, good - just making sure Iâm not giving you false hope that itâll be done tomorrow.
I still think just running the preview with âInner Shapes Firstâ would be a good indicator - you should be able to quickly spot any closed shapes that would drop from that, as they will absolutely cut first. If you arenât expecting anything that isnât part of that outer line to drop you might be able to spot that, though itâs hard to say without seeing the real design.
