How can I make it smarter about fills?

[sethgodin]

Here’s a video of it burning a rectangle with a large hollow center from an SVG imported into Lightburn v 1.2.03 running from a Mac to my BossLaser 1420.

New video by Seth Godin

It’s spending most of the time shuttling from the far left to the far right.

Why doesn’t it “know” that it would be faster to simply do the rectangle and leave the center alone?

Am I missing something?

Sorry if this is a clueless question.

[Colin (Colin Worobetz)]

Hi Seth - no not a clueless question at all. LightBurn has a “Flood Fill” option that would fill this correctly

It’s under the advanced tab once you double click your layer from the Cuts / Layers pane. You can preview your cut (Option+P) and jog the slider to see the effect.

Another option would be to do an offset fill, which would draw squares from edge to edge.

[sethgodin]

Thanks @Colin

I don’t think I phrased it clearly.

To hack the problem, instead of the big rectangle with a hollow space, I specced four narrow rectangles next to each other like lincoln logs (in Illustrator). So now the SVG should be four different filled rectangles that look to the eye like a frame.

But it’s burning the same way, painstakingly going from the left rectangle, all the way across to the right rectangle and back, instead of zipping the left burn then jumping and doing the right burn.

Does that make more sense?

it seems dumb about where the burning is, and instead is acting like it’s doing a jpg, ‘burning’ the zero parts as well.

[sethgodin]

I’ll do a dummy test file and share it here in a few minutes, just to be sure I’m not wasting your time.

thanks

[sethgodin]

okay, update

here are four test boxes

the bottom box printed “correctly” and didn’t bother going over the empty space. Amazingly, the other one on the bottom, that has gaps, DID go over the empty space.

The top two were the same, even though one had flood fill picked

4 test boxes

at the small scale, it’s not much of a difference in output time, but at 8 inches across, it’s several minutes per burn.

Does this make more sense now?

thanks

[Jimcoy (Jim Mc Coy)]

4A test boxes edit.lbrn2 (10.4 KB)
Set all to Flood Fill

[sethgodin]

nailed it

thank you