laser process tutorial

Have fun with this handy tutorial!



Start with a circle, choose a heavy stroke!





Click and drag whilst holding the alt key to duplicate, press the shift key to allign anchor point to anchor point.

Press Ctrl + D to duplicate the command, and make an array of 8 x 8.




Outline the stroke via the edit tab > path > outline stroke.



Window >  Pathfinder > merge

This joins all those individual shapes together!




Give the artwork a black fill





Ungroup the artwork and release the cliping mask, the artwork has two layers - choose one and move it to the right. Increase the size of the artboard if nessesary.



Ok - this image has it all!

All black data will engrave

All red data will mark

All blue data will cut

Cyan will cut




Black circles, blue outline



Black infils, blue outline



Blue strokes, cyan outline



Red srokes, blue outline



The four together - look how happy they are!



Speedy 300 firing its red laser at the card below




overview of the process



Hot close up action!



Might need a better camera!

Paneling tools

It starts with a surface!



Using the plug in Paneling tools for Rhino 4, it is possible to create repeat patterns over solids, surfaces or 2D planes.



There are several pre defined shapes to sample.



Or it is possible to create your own.



More please!

Rotation-ation!

This outcome had several things that we can begin to use in the digital workshop from now on, Enjoy!

We finally got around to completing the Geometric pattern tutorial that was posted on here aeons ago - which we totaly pwnd and did a much better job at ;)



Following up from the preview of the rotational engraving samples - here be a rundown of the process with added pics for you all to see!



all starts here - select rtation attachment in the printing preferences, this will as for the diameter of the object, and the height of the document.



This is the view from trotec before we're ready to press go.



In trotec we have to define certain perameters for the functioon to work.


Alt + Ctrl + S will open up this dialog box allowing you to select rotation as an assessory



And this one - select no moves which should stop the laser head from colliding with the rotation axis. (Important!)

One thing we discovered was that your stock needs to be bigger than the artwork to allow for the laser to run off each edge without collisions.









The next step would be using different materials, and also marking and cutting which I whink would look great!

Paneling tools

Elo!

Had some fun with the paneling tools plug it - without getting overly fancy, using a custom paneling grid on a surface - I was able to create an interesting surface pattern on 12mm ply!



A simple surface just over 200mm square, rebuilt with 6 u and v points, slightly edited to give depression and curvature.

The paneling grid was set to 15 in both U and V, for a rather densely populated surface, the custom shape was a simple paraboloid.

I opted for ply as it will illustrate the contours more so than acrylic would.








Thanks for looking :)

Tips for file creation

Make a fill from a stroke weight - Object  > path  > Outline stroke



For text, always create outlines! type > select outlines

Engraving pixel based artwork



Open your Jpg, bmp, png etc :)



Select the image, and choose embed to leave it as a pixel image or live trace to vectorise it.




Edit > convert to grayscale



Once grayscale, to achive a high quality engrave it may be neccessary to adjust the colour balance and increase the contrast.



Alternativly, use the live trace to vectorise the image. Use with caution as it can alter your artwork dramatically.

File Setup for Trotec Laser

Hello!

Just a friendly reminder on quick file setup for your lasering needs!





Make a new file! On startup of Illustrator you should see this dialog box, or File - New!

Specify the size of the artboard, either default paper size or a custom measurement.

You can also choose how many artboards you want to work with. (see additional Blog Entry!)



If your docuement isnt already set to RGB, do so by File > Document Colour Mode > RGB.



There is a chance that colour mode will not have changed within the colours pallet - so that will need to be updated.



All marking and cutting strokes to be set at 0.01mm

I'd reccomend removing strokes from fill engraves and text.




For strokes that are to mark, change to red 255



Cutting strokes change to blue 255



For fill engraves, change to black 0,0,0



If you have loads of empty space in your document - edit the artboard size as to reduce material and the overall size of your job.

Get your work as close as 1mm between objects for maximum efficieny.




Get really fancy - share lines from other parts of your drawing to reduce time and increase effiency in the lasering! You must ensure that you have no double lines in the document.



If you have double lines, use the direct selction tool to select and delete.



Save your work!

Current accepted file types are Adobe Illustrator CS5 or a PDF.