Hello! / Laser Marquetry

[Lee DeRaud]

After Lee's post I am not sure I under stand how it works.

My work here is complete.

(It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it...)

[Rodne Gold]

Joe , the puzzles we were doing were 248 piece 2m x 2m promo corporate things and were a mission , I'm gonna try your method for some smaller pieces , might be a nice year end corporate gift thing , always looking for something cheap and a coaster/puzzle combo might be a good seller.
I use a Roland print and cut large format printer and often combine digital printing and laser work for full colour stuff. For those without vinyl printers/cutters , prior to us getting our Print an Cut machine (we were running thermal print and cut prior to inkjets which didnt do full colour well)we used to print using a desktop printer on inkjet vinyl www.papillo.com which is actually not vinyl but a polyester and then use the laser to die/kiss cut it , worked very well and was cheap way to make full colour decals which we domed and used on our products.

Scaling on GCC machines is a compensation/calibration factor thing , the laser is not exact on each axis and you might find that cutting a 10" x 10 " square gives you a 10" x 9.8" result so you apply the scaling factor to the axis that is out and then end up with a 10" x 10" square. It is not the same as offseting countour at all and is not meant to be a "variable" setting , you calibrate the laser and leave scaling where it is. This is actually quite important , especially if you nest items combining portrait and landscape orientation as if you dont calibrate , the parts will differ. Even more important if you have multiple lasers as if they arent calibrated parts cut on different lasers will be out.

On another subject ,There is a slight problem "offsetting" or contouring in Corel , and that is the fact that the resultant offset curve consists of 1000's of nodes where the original was much simpler , apart from that one needs closed curves to do so and Corel often cannot compute a good offset for complex shapes so be careful when contouring as results can sometimes be unpredictable especially with acute angles.

[Lee DeRaud]

On another subject ,There is a slight problem "offsetting" or contouring in Corel , and that is the fact that the resultant offset curve consists of 1000's of nodes where the original was much simpler , apart from that one needs closed curves to do so and Corel often cannot compute a good offset for complex shapes so be careful when contouring as results can sometimes be unpredictable especially with acute angles.

Just saw a tip on that very subject:
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satelli...id=gef1105tip2
The contour function kind of overkills the curve, this gets it back into something reasonable.

[Rodne Gold]

Yeh , thats a great tool Lee , some nice tips on the site too - thanks.

Further to that , I have a tip to using smoothing. Overaggressive smoothing often changes the curve too much , so when doing this, copy and paste the original curve on itself , change the colour of the new curve and do the smoothing on that
You can easily see if the smoothed curve differs markedly from the original and adjust the amount of smoothing to be optimal.
Regards
Rodney

[Joe Pelonio]

For those without vinyl printers/cutters , prior to us getting our Print an Cut machine (we were running thermal print and cut prior to inkjets which didnt do full colour well)we used to print using a desktop printer on inkjet vinyl www.papillo.com which is actually not vinyl but a polyester and then use the laser to die/kiss cut it , worked very well and was cheap way to make full colour decals which we domed and used on our products.

Rodne,

I used to use that poly too, then my supplier said it was no longer available. I just checked and the website you gave is "currently being developed." I thought when I got it before Avery made it. The puzzle
in the pic is one of 10 used by a large company for corporate training exercises and they wanted 11 pieces for some reason.

[Lee DeRaud]

(Well, sorry, this thread's gotten completely hijacked...)

Joe/Rodne: where did you guys get your jigsaw puzzle cutting pattern?

[George M. Perzel]

Hi Lee;
Here's a 30 piece pattern in Corel that can be sized to fit any size-pieces just get bigger or smaller. Good Luck
George

[Joe Pelonio]

Yes, apologies to Dave but also thanks for bringing this up by his original post.

My customer wanted each of the 10 to be different, but it was easier because only 11 pieces for 12x18" puzzles. I just hand drew them with the mouse using Corel smartdraw tool. You just have to be sure to have at least two interlocks on each piece so they will stay together. I cheated by doing 3 from each pattern I drew by taking the first and stretching it on the x axis, then cutting off the lines that extended beyond the outside for the second, and stretching it on the y for the 3rd. So I only had to draw 4. If anyone knows a web site with patterns let me know, I couldn't find any that allow you to specify the overall size and number of pieces.

[Shaddy Dedmore]

oberonplace has a Jigsaw Puzzle Creator. Worth a look. Costs $40, but has a grace period if you want to try it first.

Shaddy

[Barbara Buhse]

I have the puzzle maker Shaddy mentions, and although it works well for creating the pieces, cutting it is a different story... Because each piece gets cut out separately, that makes the laser cut each overlap twice,(which basically means every line is gone over twice) which is resulting (for me, at least) in very loose puzzle pieces with 1/8" thick wood.
Barbara

[Joe Pelonio]

I guess you could move the pieces part and cut them individually and waste a little material. When I draw them I do the outside box then butt the lines where they meet, and slightly go over the edges.

[Lee DeRaud]

I have the puzzle maker Shaddy mentions, and although it works well for creating the pieces, cutting it is a different story... Because each piece gets cut out separately, that makes the laser cut each overlap twice,(which basically means every line is gone over twice) which is resulting (for me, at least) in very loose puzzle pieces with 1/8" thick wood.
Barbara

There's a "Create" radio-button selector on the control dialog, which defaults to "Puzzle Pieces"...that option does what you describe. The other option, "Cutting Edges", does the "right" (or at least more useful, IMHO) thing: it cuts each edge once, but you can't manipulate the individual pieces.

[Rodne Gold]

We get our inkjet vinyl from a local supplier that gets it from the Daito corp in Japan , clear and white , gloss and matt for both.
The oberon puzzle thing works quite well apart from the piece issues mentioned. There is very little point in manipulating the pieces for the single cut version of the generator apart from clipping sections of the whole puzzle if its too big to fit the laser. Why ? Well if you move the pieces you have to move them apart quite a bit so the interlocking pieces dont interfere and use about 2-3x more material. You can use Corels trim command to break the single cut versions curves into discrete puzzle pieces if you really want to , its a mission.
The biggest problem with the Oberon script is that it never generates the same puzzle twice using the exact same settings
I searched long and hard for a puzzle generator and oberon was the only one I could come up with that was vector base.

[Pete Thomas]

Barbara when creating the puzzle select 'Create "Cutting Edges" and you won't get cutting overlap. It will cut single lines vertical then horizontal then the the outside square, never overlaying any cuts. Works great, plan on making puzzle Xmas presents for my bothers and sisters this year.

-pete

[Sam Larter]

I do a lot of inlay with mine using Coreldraw. Look up 'Doug Green' on youtube as he has a bunch of videos that helped me immensely.

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