A few months ago, I asked the community for solutions to optimize the white spaces in my designs (which are images, not vectors) that all look quite the same (big frame, a hole in the middle, see below). I got a good solution which was cutting my design in multiple strategic points to avoid as many white spaces as possible. In some design, this is not possible or very time consuming. (see below)
Is there a way we could have a feature that lets Lightburn calculates an optimal way to engrave a whole surface while avoiding white spaces ? Converting to vectors in not an option, too many details get lost during the image tracing.
In the meantime, I’ve update to the latest version with the new “Cut Shapes” for images.
It’s a nice feature but it’s slow and a bit messy to handle with mask. In the end, dividing my image in photoshop, export individual PNG and align them in Lightburn would still be easier and faster.
I think the feature to automatically adjust the laser head movement for Images would be an awesome feature !
Thank you for this suggestion. We offer a site to capture these ideas and allow folks to vote for the suggestion. We use this information to help prioritize our efforts. If willing, it is best to post your contribution there and then provide a link to that here, so folks can see.
There is no simple way that this could be done automatically, I’m afraid. The ‘Fast Whitespace’ option for GCode lasers in the Device Settings window is going to be the best way to handle this.
I’ve considered altering the way Cut Shapes works with images to have it automatically flatten the resulting masks, which would be less messy.
There’s not going to be a way to have the software automatically choose the best masking area to cut the image - that’s what’s called an ‘NP-complete’ problem, IE, it is simple enough to understand, but would require testing so many combinations that it would take longer than the lifetime of the user to generate a result.
