Problem with ofsset fill, hangs software

problem with software ver 1.7.0.1 how do i upload my file for you to test

Just upload it here in a comment.
Offset fill is very computational intensive, it will probably just take much time to complete. There are very few use cases anyhow, maybe you can avoid it.

From the LightBurn docs, Offset fill has some specific use cases, so does the graphic you’re trying to use Offset Fill on fall into those use cases?

If the offset fill is too large it WILL take a LONG time for the version 1.7 software to generate the preview. A trick I found is to do different sections as different layers (colors) then it will do it quickly.

I have a video editing PC so it shouldn’t have any trouble with Lightburn generating offset fills of virtually any size: I9-13900KS CPU, all drives are gen 4 NVMe M.2 (Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB, Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, Crucial T505 2TB) all of which operate at up to 7,000MB/sec, 64GB DDR4-3200 RAM, GTX 4070Ti GPU, which just chews through 4K video faster than real-time, i.e. it will encode about 10 minutes of 4K video editing in about 7 minutes.

So this machine should not have any problem with offset fills, even at 5MB engraving file size. However, if I have too much offset fill chosen as a single layer to render, even my PC then has trouble with it. If I split the graphics into 2 or more layers, it will preview in about 3-15 seconds, but if I do the entire offset fill portion as one layer, it takes a few minutes. This is seems to me to be a software issue, as the same amount of engraving is being rendered in both instances.

Army Seal.lbrn2 (736.5 KB) This file takes about 3 seconds to preview on my PC because I have 2 different offset fill layers in the file.
Army Seal single layer offset.lbrn2 (715.7 KB) Despite being a slightly smaller overall file-size, when both offset fill layers are combined into a single layer, this file takes about 1min 40 seconds to preview .

I did the same thing with the USMC seal, same physical engraving size, but the preview took over 10 minutes to load on my PC.

For any slower / older machines, this time gap is going to exponentially expand giving the illusion that the machine has frozen, especially since the progress indicator gets stuck at a certain point in the process. The single layer file above goes to 6% progress then stays there till the preview opens up.

Also, it don’t believe that it did this in Lightburn version 1.4. i.e. I don’t remember any of my previews taking more than about 15 seconds despite having single layer offset fills. Unfortunately, I no longer have the install file for 1.4, or I would go back & verify this.

1 Like

I also use offset fill a LOT, because it GREATLY speeds up the engraving process. Straight line fill is fine for photo engraving, but for something like the seals I linked above, if I were to do 2 straight fill passes, the engraving would take almost 20 hours to complete. But, by instead doing 1 offset pass (initial burn pass), plus 1 fill pass (cleanup pass - burning off any paint residue left over on brass and removing some of the weird lines left by the offset fill), it cuts about 7 hours off the engraving time.