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Anthony Welch
07-04-2007, 2:44 AM
I traced a flower and leaves, then using the bezier tool(?name- as I'm not at my home computer to check) traced the outline. As I'm new at Corel Draw, when I went to trace the adjacent petals/leaves I wanted to join the nodes and try not to have to redo that particular line. The "join node" option was grayed-out and I could not find a way to make it an option and the book didn't have the info nor could I find any tutorials about it. Anyhow I went ahead and traced each individual leaf and petal like I wanted. It turned out pretty-good, but it took me approx 6 hrs and a 12pk to get through it.

After finishing it, it dawned on me that the laser is also going to do each individual leaf and petal. This will 1- be redundant, 2- take longer than it should, and 3- may not be to my likeing when finished. So I'm plannning to get another 12pk and do this again if someone can tell me how to join the adjacent nodes and not have to do that particular area. Maybe this will cut my time down considerably and it'll only take a 6pk or so.

Thanks
Anthony Welch

Corel Draw 12

Rick Hutcheson
07-04-2007, 8:51 AM
From what I think you are trying to do. Select one line, hold the shift key and select the other line. Now use the combine tool. Then you can connect the nodes.
Another way is draw all of the pedals. Then marque select them all and combine. Then go back around and connect them at each meeting point.
Basisly the 2 lines have to be combined into one object before you can connect the nodes.

Bill Cunningham
07-05-2007, 9:30 PM
Select the nodes you want to join with the node tool. Once you have selected nodes, the join button will be active and no longer grey..

Mike Null
07-05-2007, 10:01 PM
I think you have to select the two nodes you wish to join with the shape tool then "arrange>close path>then select one of the 4 options.

Richard Rumancik
07-05-2007, 11:22 PM
I traced a flower and leaves, then using the bezier tool traced the outline. As I'm new at Corel Draw, when I went to trace the adjacent petals/leaves I wanted to join the nodes and try not to have to redo that particular line. The "join node" option was grayed-out and I could not find a way to make it an option and the book didn't have the info nor could I find any tutorials about it. Anyhow I went ahead and traced each individual leaf and petal like I wanted.

After finishing it, it dawned on me that the laser is also going to do each individual leaf and petal. This will 1- be redundant, 2- take longer than it should, and 3- may not be to my likeing when finished.

Anthony, it is not clear to me what you are doing. Are you vector marking an outline? If so then the first shape could be a closed one but adjacent shapes might not be. If you overtrace adjacent boundaries it will laser vector twice.

I am not sure that you want to "join nodes" of the adjacent shapes. Don't you just want coincident nodes? Imagine that you are drawing a honeycomb. The first hexagon could be a closed shape. The second should be 5-sided (non-closed) if you don't want reburning. But you don't need to "join" the nodes of the 5-sided curve to the nodes of the hexagon. You just want them overtop existing nodes. You achieve this by turning the snap to object tool on.

Adjacent shapes could have "loose pieces" but they can still be combined. Then any adjacent nodes should be joined for better vectoring.

If I missed what you are trying to do please elaborate and we'll try again. Or if you are trying to raster-fill let me know as this is quite different.

Anthony Welch
07-06-2007, 11:03 AM
I will try what you have recommended. I'm attaching what I did. Look at it, see what I could do better, but don't do it for me.

Thanks!

Trying to attach the file, but doesn't show up. It's only a 25Kb cdr file. ????

Anthony Welch
07-07-2007, 11:13 AM
Ok, I figured out that I've got some kind of firewall problem. And that may be the reason I can't upload the cdr file. I'll deal with that later.

I've been experimenting. I've gotten as simple as two squares. Both 0.028 outline, one filled green to represent the leaf, the other white or no fill. Butt/join the two together. Now when I send it to the laser I want it to raster the leaf, do nothing to the petal (white/no fill), but engrave the outline of each. The outline being 0.028 or what ever. The joining outlines in the middle of each square, in my minds eye will engrave twice... Why? This will make the laser do double duty that is not neccessary and I'm redrawing a line that is already there. Am I chasing a red herring and wasting your time or is there an answer to this.

If so, I appologize Immensly.

Richard, you came close as to what I'm thinking and yes this will be mostly rastered, not ruling out vectoring this sometimes.


My laser is due to ship out Monday and I can't experiment with this myself at this time. This is not a pressing item, just something I came across, as this will be my logo I'll use for myself.

Thanks for lending me your time.
Anthony Welch

Mike Null
07-07-2007, 11:54 AM
In the example you describe you are correct that the center line will engrave twice.

This is a work around and not necessarily the easiest way. Create the box and draw a line down the center. Convert to curves, select all with the shift key and shape tool, arrange, combine. Set your line color to red for vector cutting. Make a box to fill half of the box and color fill in a raster color (black).

Richard Rumancik
07-07-2007, 3:53 PM
. . . I've gotten as simple as two squares. Both 0.028 outline, one filled green to represent the leaf, the other white or no fill. Butt/join the two together. Now when I send it to the laser I want it to raster the leaf, do nothing to the petal (white/no fill), but engrave the outline of each. The outline being 0.028 or what ever. The joining outlines in the middle of each square, in my minds eye will engrave twice... Why? This will make the laser do double duty that is not necessary and I'm redrawing a line that is already there. Am I chasing a red herring and wasting your time or is there an answer to this.

OK, I understand it a bit better. If your outline is .028" you won't want to vector that as the beam is only .003-.005" diameter and it would take to many passes to get .028 outline using a vector draw. The print driver will probably assume that anything over .003" wide line should be rastered anyway (might be a bit different for different makes.) So if you have a black outline that will be converted to raster and the fill will also be converted to a raster.

When there are two overlapping vectors, the laser will vector them twice. But if there is overlapping black raster, I don't think you will ever see it raster the common area twice. I have not seen this happen with mine. I think it generally works the same as a laser printer: overlapping black prints "black" not "double-black".

If I were doing it I would probably use grey scale fills only (for example use the grey100.cpl palette which gives you 100 levels of grey) and make a "map" for myself as to what level of grey will cause a certain level of "darkness" when rastered. I would use 100% black for the boundaries and fill with the %black as needed to get your contrast. You could do some fountain fills as well (varying degrees of grey within the shape) which might look good.

The laser engraver will only print b/w. So you can let the laser print driver convert this greyscale image to b/w but I usually do it "my way". I export the CorelDraw greyscale filled image as a tif, open the tif in Paint, then convert it into b/w using a Stuki conversion with intensity as I want. Then bring back into a new Corel file for lasering. I can elaborate on this if you are interested.

One tip: keep saving your work under different filenames as you go, so you can return back and try again. eg filename rev1.cdr, filename rev2.cdr Once you convert your vector to bitmap there's no going back so you want to keep the "original" vector for other attempts, uses, image sizes, etc.


Richard, you came close as to what I'm thinking and yes this will be mostly rastered, not ruling out vectoring this sometimes.
Most of my earlier comments earlier assumed 100% vectoring. The above is for 100% rastering.

Roy Brewer
07-08-2007, 11:53 PM
I traced a flower and leaves, then using the bezier tool(?name- as I'm not at my home computer to check) traced the outline. As I'm new at Corel Draw, when I went to trace the adjacent petals/leaves I wanted to join the nodes and try not to have to redo that particular line. The "join node" option was grayed-out Anthony,

Knowing your objective this is probably what I would have done.
a. Trace only the outermost outline of the white (just one part) making sure the path is closed. Fill it with white. Now draw all the internal black lines on top of the fill.
b. For each of the three green components, draw non closed shapes starting on white and ending on white(outermost line only). Use Smart Fill (X3 only) to fill with green. Now draw all the internal black lines on top of the fill.

2. Since you have X3, this is what you could have done. Draw all the black outlines just as you had envisioned (no overlap) but be sure there is no "gaps;" i.e., on a "partial" outline, be sure the starting point and the ending point is another another line on your leaf outlines. Opposite for the veins within the leafs; that is be sure to leave a gap so step 2bfixed will flow around.

A few thoughts.
1. The lines in your current drawing are .014 & .028. That means they'd all be rastered (since over the Epilog's vector limit of .007") and therefore would not be engraved twice the way you currently have them drawn. Caution, if you scale this down quite small, telling DRAW to scale outlines with objects(which you should), you'll lose these lines altogether if print driver set to Raster and you'll have the double cuts you feared if you set for Combined.
2. No. Joining nodes will not work and would not have helped in the scenario you describe.

3. You could illustrate the ease of the above steps without starting all over again. Select all your white objects and use X3's Create Boundary function. Then do the same for other colors.

4. Only now do I see you're using Corel12. Hopefully I've given you enough reason in this one post to upgrade to X3. Now, however, you'll need to complete the closed path around all three green objects and then proceed as in the petals.

Let me know if not clear.

I've attached your file(unchanged except deleted bitmap) in Corel 9 format so others can see what we're talking about.

Anthony Welch
07-09-2007, 8:48 AM
You've given me some good tips that I'll work on to make improvments. I do have corel draw upgrade x3 on the way. I appreciate you taking time out to look at this and helping me learn.

Thanks again!
Anthony Welch

Richard Rumancik
07-09-2007, 10:40 AM
Roy - for some reason I could not open the Corel 9 file in CorelDraw 11. It said that there were "file format differences". So I tried Corel 9 and it said that it "could not import the file or the file format is not supported". Not sure what might have happened . . .

Lee DeRaud
07-09-2007, 11:46 AM
I've been experimenting. I've gotten as simple as two squares. Both 0.028 outline, one filled green to represent the leaf, the other white or no fill. Butt/join the two together. Now when I send it to the laser I want it to raster the leaf, do nothing to the petal (white/no fill), but engrave the outline of each. The outline being 0.028 or what ever. The joining outlines in the middle of each square, in my minds eye will engrave twice... Why? This will make the laser do double duty that is not neccessary and I'm redrawing a line that is already there.The 'virtual segment delete' tool will erase one of two coincident ("doubled") lines...probably the one that's on "top", if it matters. (You may need to 'convert to curves' first for things like polygons and ellipses: it treats those differently for some reason.)

I suspect there are other issues inherent in what you are doing, but that's the easiest way I know to get rid of that one.

Richard Rumancik
07-10-2007, 9:21 AM
Lee, your procedure is probably correct but I think Anthony was getting worried about something that really would not cause a problem, as he was rastering the borders. If he has overlapping outlines or overlapping fills the laser should mark the top layer and ignore what is underneath. (The laser won't ignore non-visible vectors, however, but I don't think he has any vectoring.) For what he is doing, having closed shapes could be an advantage, as it allows shading (fills). If he has curves instead of closed shapes, he won't be able to fill.

Roy has given suggestions about "Smartfill" in X3. As I don't have X3 (yet) I don't know how Smartfill works, and there may be more tricks in X3 that can be used to make the process simpler. I haven't been able to view Anthony's drawing to follow Roy's procedure entirely.

Lee DeRaud
07-10-2007, 10:34 AM
Lee, your procedure is probably correct but I think Anthony was getting worried about something that really would not cause a problem, as he was rastering the borders. If he has overlapping outlines or overlapping fills the laser should mark the top layer and ignore what is underneath. (The laser won't ignore non-visible vectors, however, but I don't think he has any vectoring.)Ah. (As I mentioned in another thread, I don't do a lot of rastering.:p )
Roy has given suggestions about "Smartfill" in X3. As I don't have X3 (yet) I don't know how Smartfill works, and there may be more tricks in X3 that can be used to make the process simpler.But yeah, 'smartfill' is probably the coolest new feature of X3, especially if you do a lot of "color separation" for inlays. Example: draw two overlapping circles, yielding three areas that you want to vector in three different veneers for inlay. With 'smartfill', it is now trivial to get those three new shapes separated and manipulate them (contour/rotate/whatever) before cutting.

Anthony Welch
07-10-2007, 3:28 PM
Just received x3. I'll be working on it and let ya know how it goes when finished. Still waiting on the laser to arrive and see how it works. :mad:

This will be my logo and it'll have to go through changes such as printing to buisness cards, letter-heads, items for display. I may add to it such as banners... etc.

It may pay for me to send it to Peter Bertrand to get a more professional look, but I'm learning and you guys have given me a lot to do and learn.

Thanks!:)

Mike Null
07-10-2007, 5:46 PM
If you're thinking of having somebody do it for you we have a member who's very good.
http://www.excaliburcreations.com/