Hi!
The more i try to do more editing within lightburn, edit shapes, dxf’s an such, the more I find myself going back and forth to external cad for simple cut shapes and such. i have a small laser bed machine (K40) so i spend a lot of time splitting shapes and vectors to fit the bed and then I glue all parts together but i spend too much time trying to do simple thing like - just splitting shapes. draw a shape (sketch)> run a line through it (cutting tool) > now split!.
this might be easily possible but if this is not intuitive then i tend to not waste time and do this outside lightburn but i wish not to - i want to stay in lightburn and do more.
How can i just draw an articulated line/spline across a shape in any way i like/need and then simply cut the shape into pieces?
I am not talking about boolean two closed shapes - i am talking about a splitting line (zero width), cut shape and place each piece where and how i want it on bed (while we’re at it - nesting would be nice, or at least export all shapes on bed as separated single entities so i can nest those outside lightburn)
At the moment, you can’t, but it is a planned feature. LightBurn was never intended to be a full drawing package, and it’s already quite a bit more powerful than other laser software in that regard. It’ll get there, but it’s been one developer in two years. Even I have limits.
And I’m pretty sure you’ve already used the feature request site - Post it there.
Not really so, - You are priceless and limitless.
I never used Fider. I am not that active online and I try to keep the number of sites which i must sign in into bare minimum.
Cheers.
Well, it doesn’t track you, it only sends emails when threads get updated (or if you’ve commented) and it’s how we track feature suggestions, prioritize them by popularity, and so on.
For this particular feature it doesn’t matter much, because it’s already planned, but if you have something you actually want to happen, posting it there is really the best way to go about it. Things posted to the forums just “sink” and eventually disappear.
You can do “opposite” operations with duplicate shapes easily, like this:
Select both:
Duplicate both shapes in place (Ctrl+D), then do a Boolean Subtract with one pair, and a Boolean Intersection with the other pair:
That gives you two results - one where the original shape overlapped the rectangle (union) and the other where they didn’t overlap (subtracting the rect from the shape):
Then do it again with the remaining rectangle and the lower half of the first result. I’ve moved the pieces a little to make the splits obvious:
Just to show the different operations more clearly:
When doing a subtract, selection order is important. If the result wasn’t what you expected, undo, and click the subtract button again - it flips the order.
