Offset fill makes smooth corners as lines or not?

[pZq (Peter Lydman)]

I was wondering about the new offset fill functionality. Is the offset fill functionality making smooth corners as lines instread of curves ?

I mean that if you have a O character. The outer lines of the O is ok but the smaller the offset fill radius gets or in some other character which has round engravings, it seems like the offset fill is making lines of instead of curves -> at leas my CNC (planet-cnc software) starts to make this tok-tok-tok-tok (so stops and starts movement instead of smooth curve movement) on some of the curves which apparently are lines ?..

Can you @LightBurn describe, should it be able to convert round corners as curves or is it converted to lines and if so, when does it convert to lines ?

[Stroonzo (Jeff)]

Offset vector fill (manually) is an approach I have used for some time. I see almost identical characteristics in the end result utilizing the new function in LightBurn.

@pZq

Is the offset fill functionality making smooth corners as lines instead of curves?

My opinion on this is to say, I do not attribute that effect (arcs narrowing to a vertex) to the offset fill function. I have observed this as a natural result of the constraint of concentric offset proportionally reducing the elements of arcs and polylines to the extent that eventually characteristics change.

Restating: as the offset fill gets smaller, you run out of room for the arc.

Below is a project I made and use to test my machine after optical alignment. Take note that as the offsets become smaller, to maintain the arc I have to create a gap in the those corners to recreate / restart the arc. Otherwise, once the space for the arc has run out, it is sharp corners from there.

Alternatively, doing this manually, one could create something such as the following, but it is with its own problems and hard angles:

or

[LightBurn (Oz)]

The offsetting library we use requires only lines as input, so they are converted and then offset.

The next release of LightBurn does these offsets using mitered corners instead of rounded corners because it is much faster to generate them, and works well for the intended usage.