Jake Vander Ende
04-22-2015, 4:19 PM
Greetings, forumites. I've been a lurker for a while, having gotten my laser a year ago, but the time has come where I need to post because I need your help. It turns out most people who use Illustrator or CorelDraw don't use them to generate machine paths, so the appearance of a project matters far more than how it was constructed. We all know that's not the case, so we end up with specialized knowledge about how to build files.
Anyway, I've reached the borders of my knowledge and I'm hoping someone here can help.
I designed a game called Breaker Blocks that's played with tiles that are about 1"x1". These tiles are rounded corner squares with varying dovetail tabs. I cut player tiles in 3x3 squares (two sets of 3x3 for one color and 2 for the second color) and I cut a 4x6 area of 24 squares in a third color. From a technical standpoint, the game is designed to waste as little acrylic as possible, so all of the sets are supposed to take advantage of shared edges to save acrylic and cutting time.
To show you what I mean, here's a PNG of a single player tile sheet. I'm new to the forum, so please let me know if that's unviewable or too small for anyone.
312059
You can see that it ends up being a huge sheet that's 4x8 sets of 3x3 tiles, for a total of 288 squares. Seeing why getting shared lines to work appropriately should be pretty clear.
I designed it in Illustrator CS 5.5 by starting with one square, making the first 3x3 set, and then adding the tabs where they needed to go. I used Shape Builder to turn that into 9 individual objects and I added a layer in front for the tile artwork. I copied the set to make 4 rows of 3x3 sets, then copied that column to make 8 total columns. I know the cutting and shared lines work as individual tiles, sets of 3x3, and single columns of four sets, but the problems happen when I do a full page.
My process involves making designs in Illustrator on OSX, then opening them in CorelDraw X6 on Windows 7 via Parallels since I'm using an Epilog Zing24 that doesn't have OSX drivers.
When I generated the shared lines, I used the Pathfinder > Outline tool in Illustrator. That was the only process the removed redundant paths for me, but the problem is that it generated TONS of independent objects. Each corner, each face of each square, and each tab became its own object, sending my total to over 3,000 cutting objects and several hundred raster objects.
When I cut, everything rasters just fine but my machine is omitting cuts seemingly at random. It just skips over them like they're not there. Epilog has been extremely slow in getting back to me, but in the little dialogue we have had they seem to think there's a memory error from there being too many objects.
Yesterday I found limited success by grouping cutting objects in one group and raster objects in another group, then opening the file in CorelDraw X6 and doing Ungroup > Weld for each group. This left me with two objects, which worked once. When I did Reset > Go after the first job to cut a second sheet, the same kinds of cutting omissions happened again.
I'm at a loss here. I've wasted so much acrylic and so much time, yet I'm no closer to figuring out what the problem is, never mind how to fix it. ANY insight would be greatly appreciated, since this isn't even going to be a one-time thing. I have several jobs like this to do and mastering the process is critical.
Thank you for your help. I'm confident that if any place anywhere on the internet has a solution for me, this is going to be it.
Anyway, I've reached the borders of my knowledge and I'm hoping someone here can help.
I designed a game called Breaker Blocks that's played with tiles that are about 1"x1". These tiles are rounded corner squares with varying dovetail tabs. I cut player tiles in 3x3 squares (two sets of 3x3 for one color and 2 for the second color) and I cut a 4x6 area of 24 squares in a third color. From a technical standpoint, the game is designed to waste as little acrylic as possible, so all of the sets are supposed to take advantage of shared edges to save acrylic and cutting time.
To show you what I mean, here's a PNG of a single player tile sheet. I'm new to the forum, so please let me know if that's unviewable or too small for anyone.
312059
You can see that it ends up being a huge sheet that's 4x8 sets of 3x3 tiles, for a total of 288 squares. Seeing why getting shared lines to work appropriately should be pretty clear.
I designed it in Illustrator CS 5.5 by starting with one square, making the first 3x3 set, and then adding the tabs where they needed to go. I used Shape Builder to turn that into 9 individual objects and I added a layer in front for the tile artwork. I copied the set to make 4 rows of 3x3 sets, then copied that column to make 8 total columns. I know the cutting and shared lines work as individual tiles, sets of 3x3, and single columns of four sets, but the problems happen when I do a full page.
My process involves making designs in Illustrator on OSX, then opening them in CorelDraw X6 on Windows 7 via Parallels since I'm using an Epilog Zing24 that doesn't have OSX drivers.
When I generated the shared lines, I used the Pathfinder > Outline tool in Illustrator. That was the only process the removed redundant paths for me, but the problem is that it generated TONS of independent objects. Each corner, each face of each square, and each tab became its own object, sending my total to over 3,000 cutting objects and several hundred raster objects.
When I cut, everything rasters just fine but my machine is omitting cuts seemingly at random. It just skips over them like they're not there. Epilog has been extremely slow in getting back to me, but in the little dialogue we have had they seem to think there's a memory error from there being too many objects.
Yesterday I found limited success by grouping cutting objects in one group and raster objects in another group, then opening the file in CorelDraw X6 and doing Ungroup > Weld for each group. This left me with two objects, which worked once. When I did Reset > Go after the first job to cut a second sheet, the same kinds of cutting omissions happened again.
I'm at a loss here. I've wasted so much acrylic and so much time, yet I'm no closer to figuring out what the problem is, never mind how to fix it. ANY insight would be greatly appreciated, since this isn't even going to be a one-time thing. I have several jobs like this to do and mastering the process is critical.
Thank you for your help. I'm confident that if any place anywhere on the internet has a solution for me, this is going to be it.