Vector Engraving

[Robert Walters]

I made a 3" wide bullseye (dart boardish) of 6 concentric circles.
Half the circles are hairline, the other half are 1pt.

No fill, just engraving the outline only on all circles.

This took 15 minutes to engrave! OUCH!


Other than taking the 1pt wide circles and splitting them into 2 (or 3) hairline circles next to each other to reproduce the same visual widths, is there any other way to VECTOR (not raster) engrave lines of varying widths (larger than hairline) like this?

Also...
If anyone has any additional info (tips/tricks) on vector engraving in general, I'd appreciate it.

[John Noell]

A bit more info would be helpful. That IS a long time. What DPI were you using for the rastering? I am guessing it must have been quite high to take so long. At least on my machine, a hairline (or anything less than about .175mm) simply means vector -- and that actually is thinner than .175mm, so puting 2 or 3 side by side is not nearly the same result as a 1pt wide line.

[Scott Shepherd]

Yeah, take it way out of focus. Your line will get fat.

[Robert Walters]

John,

50P-25S-1000D
I didn't intend on RASTER engraving, just forgot that greater-than hairline doesn't VECTOR engrave.

Hmmm...
I wonder if I drew a 1pt line in Corel, zoom in like crazy, then try to replicate it using hairline, and see what results I get. Maybe I can get a "scale" to reference by for future use.

1pt == x number of hairlines spaced y apart (sorta thing).

Even if its 4 hairlines vector engraved has to be FAR FASTER than 1pt raster engraved.



Scott (Steve),

That's one idea. The only issue is that not all the circles are to be "fat", only some of them.
I do need to play with forcing it out-of-focus on my laser to get the hang of it too. Just something I haven't tried yet.

[Scott Shepherd]

Robert, I'm only midly familiar with the M-300. Can you assign material thicknesses to colors? On the newer ones, we can assign colors which have a different Z height. So we can vector thin lines in focus, then the machine will drop out of focus and vector the fat lines out of focus. I don't recall if the M-300 can do that or not.

If not, perhaps 2 job files, one for each focus level. Run on, run the next. Might take a few seconds more to do, but could save you the time of rastering, easily.

Just a thought.

[John Noell]

Uhh, is there a reason you really need that much resolution? Rastering is LOT faser at 300DPI than 1000DPI. Yeah, vectoring can be faster (depending on what you are doing - not cutting thick acrylic) but low-res rastering might be faster, depending on the situation.

[Larry Bratton]

You can also use the Interactive Contour Tool to make a "thick" line by adding multiple hairline outlines very close to each other on your selected ellipses. Cut your power down and vector. Very quick. Might take some experimentation to get your settings just right, but it works.

[Scott Shepherd]

Uhh, is there a reason you really need that much resolution? Rastering is LOT faser at 300DPI than 1000DPI. Yeah, vectoring can be faster (depending on what you are doing - not cutting thick acrylic) but low-res rastering might be faster, depending on the situation.

John, on the ULS that 1000 doesn't mean the same thing as on an Epilog. There's a separate setting for that, and it's called "Image Density". You get 6 resolutions. In his example, he didn't say what that setting was, so we don't know what resolution it was run at. The settings are 1-6, with 4,5, and 6 being usable for work, the others are so low, they are mostly for proofing.

I don't have the settings in front of me, but 6 is something like 1000dpi, and 5 is around 600, and 4 is about 250-300.

[Mike Null]

I could raster that in a couple of minutes. Why is it taking so long?

[Ross Moshinsky]

1000dpi takes 2x longer than 500dpi. If you work with a material frequently, you should do a grid and come up with proper settings. For example, I know on coated steel/brass 100 speed, 50 pwr, and 500dpi is my optimal setting. In fact, I use this setting with most materials including plastics and acrylics.

You should be able to offset the arcs a bunch of times and trim them up to seem like its filled. You'll need to run a couple of tests to see what the offset should be. I'm not confident this will be faster. The laser may not select the order which the engraving is done properly and it might be engraved very inefficiently. I'd personally just run the job at 500dpi and be done with it. You should also try to get your speed as close to 100 as possible so your engraving is done as fast as possible.

[Scott Shepherd]

Ross, read post #8, the 1000ppi is not the same on ULS as other machines. We do not know what he ran it at, as he didn't post the measurement for ULS that would tell us.

[Dan Hintz]

I don't have the settings in front of me, but 6 is something like 1000dpi, and 5 is around 600, and 4 is about 250-300.
A reminder:
6 - 1000dpi
5 - 500dpi
4 - 333dpi
3 - 250dpi
2 - 125dpi
1 - 75dpi

These are from memory, so it's possible they're incorrect...

[Robert Walters]

Just ran a test...

In the driver for mine it's called "Image Density" to change DPI.
Quality (6) to Speed (1) as follows:

# - DPI
6 - 1000
5 - 500
4 - 500
3 - 500
2 - 500
1 - 500

I'll contact ULS and see what's up with all the 500's (as displayed on the laser when the job is sent).

When set to 1, it's fast (53s) but UGLY!!!

I did need that resolution - It's being used as an alignment jig.

No option to set height to colors (too old I suspect).

Drawing a hairline circle, then using the contour tool with multiple steps seems to have allowed me to reproduce the same results vector engraving instead of rastering.