A little thinking “outside the box” again. It’s easy to get used to to using closely cropped images and either moving the object to be engraved to fit the preview window, or move the preview window from the app to fit the object. But how would you accurately place an image measuring 50x11mm exactly in the middle of a 100x100mm cork coaster. Or placing the same image 1cm in from the right hand edge and 1cm up from the bottom. It’s actually very, very easy, you just make an image 100x100mm with your smaller graphic positioned where you want it. Instead of your preview being 50x11mm it will be 100x100mm, the same size as the coaster. Simply align the preview edges with the edges of the coaster and the image will be burnt exactly where you want it.
What about irregular shapes like ovals, triangles etc? A square or rectangular preview window will give us an indication that we are near to where we need to be, but is far from ideal. So project an oval preview on an oval object using gcode preview.
If you want to get a real feel for how the finished product will look, in full colour, just take a picture of the object to be engraved with your mobile phone. Send it to yourself in Messenger, What’sApp, email etc. Open a program such as Inkscape and paste the picture in. Crop and resize it to the actual dimensions and start designing. This will be especially useful if you are going to engrave on something that already has a design on it. You can fit your design in and around the other designs keeping the required distance from any other artwork. Draw a line around the new artwork in Inkscape and export the line to use as a gcode preview to accurately place the new work. I didn’t think of this when I made this film, so I will make a new film dedicated to this method of adding graphics to already existing artwork. But seeing your work piece in full scale and full colour in a design program is very reassuring.
One VERY important rule to follow when using this technique is that all the engraving must be done in BIN or greyscale modes (not sure about pencil mode, I’ve never used it) and you can’t use the auto-crop function, it will ruin everything. If you use gcode it will ignore all the white space around you graphic and your 50x11mm image will become 100x22mm. In greyscale the laser will start at the top and slowly work it’s way down, line by line. Which takes forever. In BIN mode the laser will jump straight to the black bits of your image and start burning them. This is the preferred method. When exporting an outline purely for use as an aligning tool, you have to enable “gcode preview” from the options menu. You can use all straight, connected lines for this outline, you’re not going to burn them.
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