Hi everyone,
I am the WizzardOfAwes, also known by some people in some communities as LASER-RASTERIZER, although in this particular community, I go by C, I have primarily been a Lurker and havent really previously met any of you.
Even as a lurker this forum has been so valuable to me when I was beginning with lasers, that I feel obligated to give something back, now that I think I have something worth giving.
I have been working on a personal project called:
MOPA-Laser-Rasterizer
a collection of tools and guides for preparing artwork for MOPA fiber-laser engraving.
It began as a way for me to make color engravings less tedius. Finding color settings is tedius enough, but finding the settings is not even half the work, separating, tracing, bezier curves, booleaning, over and over , until youve essentially completely redrawn the artwork in a format the laser can actually understand.
“Why doesnt it work like a printer?”
Was the question I started with , and set out to make the laser work more like a printer.
The tool then slowly grew into a much larger experimental toolset.
As capabilities grew, it progressively made it cheaper and cheaper to experiment as I essentially had a app for controlling all sorts of things that used to take a ton of manual effort in multistep multi -tool processes to try snd simply wouldnt be tried, Now it as as simple as changing the value of a slider or selecting something new from a drop down box, unchecking or checking a box, etc
Experimentation accellerated as I basically just kept exposing variables for controling everything I could think of and seeing what would be usefully interesting.
Until I stumbled on something pretty incredible, which is the fauxlographic engraving techniques I’m going to mention a lot, because ive never seen anything like them before.
i’ve been looking and the best ive found was sort of what i think of as entry level diffraction techniques. a singular diffraction gradient across the entire piece with maybe one or two irridescent color settings involved. or maybe a color image presented via diffraction gratings rather than typical static color. Both are still impressive and beautiful, But these fauxlographic techniques im sharing are on a whole other level
I didnt set out to create this, but once i did, I just had to share it so someone more artisticaly inclined than me can do something amazing.
Everything this became, was started when I discovered Ben Krasnow’s github repositories on MOPA colors on stainless , and difraction. That sent me down a huge rabbit hole and I am super grateful that Ben had the drive and belief that led to him putting those repositories on github and encouraging experimentation. If I ever meet the guy, Id like to buy him a coffee or a beer and say cheers. If you have a mopa laser and havent seen those repositories, you should check them out:
The site includes workflows for:
- MOPA color engraving and color discovery
- Raster-to-vector conversion and cleanup
- Material-Library-driven LightBurn project generation
- Depth and relief engraving, with a unique color-guided-depth feature
- Hatch palettes (color in artwork → hatch settings mappings)
- Fauxlographic and diffraction-grating engraving experiments with tons of controls, such as gradients that can be scoped to individual shapes, whole artwork, custom painted diffraction gradients, and directionality and orientation control such as left to right top to bottom center to edge, and the reverses of those, along with the angular degree of the gradient, and highly customizable fauxlographic settings
- Multi-geometry jobs, where different parts of the artwork receive different geometric treatments, give some colors ordinary vectors, redraw others with configurable glyphs or cut the glyphs out of the closed vectors, and other colors yet can be routed to the diffraction controls mentioned earlier… allowing for highly unique and complex multi-geometry style engravings
The last two are where it gets incredibly interesting.
This is a hobby project, not a commercial product. I am one person building and supporting it outside my normal job, and I personally cover the infrastructure costs. There will be bugs, rough edges, unclear documentation, and times when I cannot respond quickly. Please report issues anyway, especially confusing or unnecessarily difficult parts - that feedback is how I will improve it.
The site is free to use. Guests receive five processing jobs per day, no signup required, and free member accounts only require a valid email for additional use and convenience features. The account requirement is mainly there to keep bots from easily running up the processing bill.
Now, the part where I ask for your lasers
A major reason I am releasing this is to learn how broadly these techniques transfer,
I have found some extremely interesting results with MOPA color and diffraction-style engravings, including effects that can look like normal color from one angle and shift into vivid psychedelic diffraction patterns as the light or viewing angle moves, while the image still remains cohesive and recognizable. But I only have my own laser, lenses, and materials to test with.
I would love help figuring out what is repeatable across:
- Different laser sources and source types
- Different lenses and field sizes
- Stainless types, finishes, and preparation methods, if anyone has palettes of settings for titanium, id love to see what they can make with it, all my color work has been with stainless.
- Settings, lighting, and viewing angles
- Different approaches to fauxlographic or diffraction geometry
If you experiment with it, please share both your successes and failures. Photos are useful, but video is especially valuable for effects that change with the viewing angle.
You can email results or questions or just comments to admin@mopa-laser-rasterizer.com, or post them in this thread. If possible, include your laser/source, lens or FOV, material and finish, settings, lighting, and viewing angle. If you email results, please also let me know whether I may share them publicly and how you would like to be credited.
There is also a Community Set feature for users who want to anonymously donate a small palette of successful color settings. It is a searchable collection of settings tied to laser, lens, and material details, intended to give people with similar equipment a starting point when color hunting. It does not need to be an entire production palette - even one good black, blue, or other useful mark setting can help someone else who is just getting started.
Your artwork and settings stay private unless you explicitly choose to contribute them to the Community Set. Guest job outputs disappear when you leave the page or after 15 minutes. Member job outputs are retained for up to seven days, while saved palettes remain until a member deletes them.
This is not a push-button “make a masterpiece” tool. At least, not until you have take a significant bit of time to grok the system and set it up for your laser environment. MOPA color and fauxlographic engraving are essentially experimental processes that reward patience, reading, testing, and keeping good notes. I have tried to document the important concepts and workflows as clearly as I can.
Site and guides
I recommend reading these in order where possible:
I originally built this to make color engraivng less tedius for myself.
It escalated into a set of techniques that I think could enable some genuinely unusual work in the hands of people with more artistic vision than me. So I wanted to share it and see what people can come up with.
Please try it, break it, make something beautiful with it, and let me know what your laser reveals.
if you do choose to experiment with it, please start out with procesing dimensions specified no more than 400-500px for the maximum dimension, once you get something you like and want more detail you can go as high as 800px and lightburn will still proccess the resulting files in a reasonable ammount of time
but if you try using any of the diffraction related workflows at the maximum allowed by the site of 1600px, you are going to have a bad time …
To get an idea, lightburn filesize of the outputs , dpending on the complexity and fullness of the artwork,
- 400px may be 15-25mb
- 800px around 50-75mb
- 1600px around 120-150mb per file
Aand thats not like a big image file or something, its 150mb of vector data, it will possibly take hours just to frame. Your pc will struggle, even if you have an insanely performant pc. We are talking Millions of vector objects
With the diffraction techniques, you will be surprised by how much detail you get out of 400px too, and frustrated by how much longer it takes to process at 800 or higher in comparison.
feel free to reply here with any questions or feedback, or experiment results as well
I will do my best to be responsive, but keep in mind I am literall just one person , doing this as a hobby. And I have several other hobbies to juggle it with.
I promise you, this set of tools is not just another run of the mill vibe coded vectorizer that does a poor job at the same things that have been solved better already time and time before by dozens of other apps, I wouldnt share or even use it if it was.
Read the relase storey or follow along with MOPA MADNESS or GEOMETRIC ALCHEMY guides and you will see.
Im looking forward to seeing anyone’s createns or failures
I want to find out if these technique swork across different lasers and power levels / fov lenses, etc etc, but i only have one fiber laser
scroll through the release story page to see some videos of these types of engravings and decide if you want to try one
I really need your lasers
ps. this is the only post I will make about this, it is not my intention to spam the forum, I just want to share.
- WizzardOfAwes