Colour Mapping a square border??

[Ian Wilson (AUST)]

Hi Fellow creekers,



I have a border made up of three squares. I'd like to colour code all 4 sides to colour map to decrease Laser time...how can I change the colour of each side ( as the square is continuous) if I select blue all 4 sides go blue. I need each side a different colour.....if I can achieve this do you think it will save much time??? It takes an hour to do a timber plaque slightly larger than A4. I have a 35 watt Epilog!!!

Your help appreciated.

Regards,


Ian Wilson

PS Sorry to read the posts of those in the States doing it real tough..I sincerely hope it gets better real soon. Australia says its out of the woods but our new Govt has spent all our savings and put us in debt...we may not have seen the worst of it yet.

[Dan Hintz]

Ian,

The border needs to be four separate lines if you want them all different colors. That said, your system may support processing order where the order of the lines in the file determines the order they're cut in (removing the need for color, and a better idea when you have a lot of lines). Corel, for example, allows you to select an object and move it forward/back in the item queue.

[Rodne Gold]

It will be a lot quicker to use the countour tool and make the border a vector line , make sure your contour offsets are close enough so it becomes a solid line. The laser will raster the innards and whiz around the border a few times to give you a thickish square border.

[Dan Hintz]

Ah, I didn't realize what he had done until you said something, Rodney... didn't think he was actually rastering the border, I just thought he had a number of items that he wanted to speed up the vectoring of.

[Ian Wilson (AUST)]

Dear Dan and Rodne

Thanks for your replies...........Dan I was thinking of rastoring the border but you both seem to think vectoring would be quicker???

The middle square of the boarder is 1.5mm thick...will this be a problem for vectoring?

Cheers Ian

[Dan Hintz]

For items that cover a large area overall but take up a relatively small amount of actual real estate (borders fit into that category nicely), vectoring is almost always faster. You may need several close lines to get the width you want, or you can try defocusing for the border just a bit (but you may lose some crispness at the edges)... you'll have to experiment.

[George M. Perzel]

Hi Ian;
Maybe I got this wrong but if you used the rectangle tool to make your border (box), then click on the box, go to Arrange-Convert to Curves. This will make a node a each corner. Then double click on the box (now gives you the Shape tool) and select a node and then click on the Break Curve icon in the tool bar. Repeat for the other corners and then each side will be a separate line.
Good Luck
Best regards;
George
LaserArts

[Richard Rumancik]

. . . The middle square of the boarder is 1.5mm thick...will this be a problem for vectoring?

Using "Imperial" measurements, 1.5mm is about .060". For a beam of .003" diameter I would use a contour offset of .0025" to make sure there is overlap. So .060 /.0025 = 24 passes. This would be feasible; how it compares time-wise is hard to say. I use this method for thinner borders and it helps then. As the border gets wider then there is a lot of vectoring to do so at some point the advantage is lost.

The raster method takes a lot of time because you have to sweep over the whole "bounding box" even though you are marking only a few pixels at each edge. I think you wanted to raster the left and right sides separately, but I'm not sure if your laser can do this by color coding them - my laser cannot.

If you want to try raster, you could create the border as four thin rectangles which have a 1.5 mm width. The top and bottom rectangles would extend fully left to right. The vertical ones would be tucked inside so there is no corner overlap. Use no outline, solid fill. Then set your cluster setting (normally used with rubber stamps) so it rasters the left and right separately. No guarantees . . . if you want to experiment make yourself a 1" x 1" test version to save time.