I apologize in advance if I didn’t do my research. I’m getting most engraves and cuts just fine, but this is my first project, and I’m struggling to engrave a raster of a flower with a complex clip on it.
I designed the image in inkscape (I’ll attach files below). Everything is cutting fine (some minor burning, but I’m counting myself lucky considering my laser is clamped to a custom plastic bracket I 3d printed haha). The svg is a relatively complex cut containing several vector images, some text, some offset cuts, and the problem child, a swamp mallow flower raster with a drop shadow. The svg looks fine in inkscape and edge (boy don’t they all), but in lightburn I get a weird “tool” outline of the image with no detail, offset from where the engrave should happen, and everything but the image cuts.
Please let me know what I’m doing wrong, or steps I can take to address this. This is for a small memorial for a friend’s mother. It’s ugly as sin, but it’s my first real project (previously I used a super-expensive machine at my university’s campus but did not have access to lightburn; the operator managed the machine themselves). I think my speeds and power settings are fine, but something’s wrong with my svg or how lightburn handles it or my configuration of lightburn.
This community seems incredibly informative, but I’m kind of lost wading through documentation. A pointer in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! I look forward to purchasing lightburn in any event, the convenience and power is just incredible.
For those interested, I was able to work around this issue. It seems that lightburn doesn’t like “clips” in inkscape. By exporting the image to a plain raster and re-importing, I was able to do a correct burn. Now I just need to tweak my speed and power settings.
Thanks for any who looked at this! I will leave the topic up incase someone from lightburn is interested in this strange behavior. If you know what I was doing wrong, I’d still be interested in hearing from you. If not, happy carving!
Image was initially just a flower raster. Image was traced to path in inkscape via trace-to-path and invert image, then cleaned up (removing e.g. speckles) as a step towards producing the clip. Raster was kept and converted to greyscale. Next, the trace was “stretched” into a drop shadow using Path → Linked offset.
What follows is slightly complicated. Basically, a first clip was set between the raster and the the original trace, producing the flower with no drop shadow. Next, to add the drop shadow, I exported this to raster and brought it back in (to “erase” the clip), then I applied a second clip with the linked offset in order to apply the drop shadow. Looking back, this last step was unnecessary; I should have just “cut out” the raster from the linked offset, leaving the drop shadow and the raster as two portions.
Clipping is done in inkscape via Object → Clip → Set Clip.
As I mentioned, exporting the raster and reimporting erases the problem. This is what I’ll do in the future.
Great product, by the way; this is an instant purchase for me once the trial expires.
If any of this was unclear please ask and I’ll try to explain better.
Thanks again,
–Trebor
EDIT: I am trying to produce a simpler mockup that also demonstrates the “tool offset” in the layer window, but I’m running an engraving right now and can’t verify in lightburn. If I can reproduce with the simpler svg I will attach it.
