I wish to make a T shirt using heat transfer vinyl. In the past I have used Make The Cut, a similar idea to Lightburn but for a cutter, wonderful but no longer supported.
My imported svg is of an airplane, I modified the drawing by adding wingtips and some side decal.
The underlying problem is that I can only cut closed images. The file attached has only the three windows that are actually still closed loops. The rest of the image because of my modifications are all open.
The two things I hope someone can help me with - using the “motion area” between a couple of the blades on the propeller How do I close this curved box? I have tried everything I could read up on. Likely something easy that I missed.
Once I get things closed up, using the closest wing tip I wish to cut only the oval tip. Then I will cut the wing as a separate operation. Question The shared line between the tip and the body, is this an issue? I have not gotten this far. If I can close all the parts I can export to MTC and do the layers there. I would like to try cutting the vinyl with my Falcon 2 as well.
In that image, you can close some of the areas using a combination of the Node Edit Tool and the Close Path tools.
Based on what I copied above, there are parts that will never be closed without extensive editing. One idea is to copy parts to different layers to create closed sections. Once you have a closed path for everything, then move it all to one layer. Note: A closed path can be confirmed by turning on Fill for that layer.
Lightbutn might complain about duplicate lines, but your vinyl cutter should be happy.
Update: I did some messing with your drawing, and closed some areas not closed. Switch the object on the C02 layer to the C10 and you will see my thinking. CTRL-D some of it, click C02, Scissors the unwanted lines, close if open, and switch it back to the C10 layer.
The red ovals mark places where a line ends on another (possibly closed) shape. The shape the line is coming from can’t be closed, because T intersections can’t close.
The blue ovals mark places where shapes on different layers meet. The black lines will not close the red shapes, because they’re on a different layer and, even if they were on the red layer, those T intersections won’t close.
For example, the prop could become multiple closed shapes, with overlapping sides that would look like they have T joins:
Three blades
Hub
If you were going to use LightBurn, you’d then set the Cut Optimizations to Remove overlapping lines and have the laser cut them only once. However, I don’t know how overlapping lines will work with a drag-knife machine.
For my next attempt! I think I will create one drawing with intersections multiple wrongness and all things not workable, then… I will make multiple copies each to a new file and remove the unwanted bits. I will end up with yellow parts, white parts, silver parts. Each vinyl colour will have its own cut file.
It might be easier to do that within LightBurn, putting each “color” on a separate layer, so that you can turn them on and off as needed. You can then export the layers to separate SVG files for the drag knife machine.
As part of that, you’ll want to study the Edit Nodes doc, because that’s how you’ll combine & separate all the lines & shapes.
