For displaying an artist book I want to laser a bookstand. I made a digital drawing which I want to engrave into plywood and an outline which will be cut.
How the design looks in Illustrator
I made the drawing and outline in Adobe Fresco with vector brushes. I then Imported that design into Illustrator to add image traced ornaments and text.
A few things happen depending on the file type I’m importing in lightburn.
When I import the .ai file directly into lightburn. The drawing (which I want to engrave), the text and the ornaments don’t show up. Only the outline and a couple of square which I have drawn as a reference to my book show up. From what I have briefly read so far on the forum Lightburn likes .ai files and should be able to import them. Alas, no luck.
Most clean up relatively easy by drawing a shape (with the “draw line tool”) around a part of the artifact, selecting the artifact and the shape drawn with the line tool and performing a boolean operation to remove the artifact. Most lines disappear this way but a couple persist. I have to manually select every section of the artifact and perform the same action as described above for every segment which gets quite annoying and is leaving a tiny gap for every line that crosses the segment. The gap is little and probably won’t affect the engraving but it shouldn’t really be there.
Another “error” is that some of the overlapping strokes from the Adobe Fresco drawing seem to cancel each other out and produce blank areas where I’d want it to be engraved. In some places it work and the lines connect. In other places they cancel each other out. A solution is to manually add the strokes to each other so they become one shape but this is again quite tedious.
Lastly the text is a different font and the ornaments don’t fully import, resulting in large areas that are interpreted to be engraved where in the image they are blank spots in the design.
What can I do to prevent this from happening or have the file import as it looks in Illustrator?
I have tried exporting it as a png and then tracing it in Lightburn, but I find on either end of the tracing option I lose too much quality (since there are some pretty small details). It doesn’t fully trace the finest lines or the lines close to each other get mushed together into a black area.
I needed a seperation so I could try some type of color with my fiber… had to seperate each color out… did this with Gimp… Lightburn will import a pdf type, but it didn’t quite work right for me… probably operator error… already had it separated in Gimp…
I separate a bunch of items into layers while in Gimp… export it as a pdf and run it though a simple python script and have a file for each layer… I can then import each part… they stay properly aligned.
The script is for python3, so remove the .txt extension and mark it executable…
Adding the image as a fourth layer to your three Vector Layers would offer the most simplicity. You’ll likely find that this would be the fast way to get to your goal.
I feel that you’re seeing the complex structural differences between how illustration software (with line width / line weight control) and how they handle overlapping and opacity in a vector-image, compares to how a laser engraver tool is set to accommodate laser dot-size.
Along with engraving vectors, and Beziers along a path at the dot-width, LightBurn engraves images as raster images. By the time images get to the engraver, they are all left/right vectors and reliant on the dot-width (DPI or Line interval) settings for production. The Line-weight in the art remains in the art but it’s no longer in terms of those paths, lines, or curves.
Pursuing the illustration as a vector illustration in LightBurn will prove very challenging.
I will give this a try. If this doesn’t work I will try what Jack has suggested. I tried importing the illustration as a .pdf and the results were indeed better, but the head of the circus director (in the middle) turned black and would have been engraved as one shape without the nose, eyes, etc. I tried replacing the head with a good import of the .ai file but removing the old head introduced new problems with another figure.
