Glowforge Tips & Tricks: How To Create Layers

[Music] hey folks welcome to steel forge my name is scott today i'm going to go through how i layered a recent design that i just did the finished product uh it's a pub sign basically and here's the pub sign if you are on the glowforge beginners group on facebook you will have seen me post about this this is the pub sign here i am super happy with the way this worked out um so what i thought i do is i'm not selling the design just yet for this i'm actually going to be trying to sell the finished product maybe later on once i have sold a few of these i'll actually let this loose in terms of the design um the just a couple of pointers here it's a little tricky somebody was asking me about you know selling a design file it's a little tricky because although this one here is just sort of a generic the red dragon and then the proprietor is obviously me at the bottom um they they are personalized the ones that i will be selling will be personalized so it'll say like i don't know steel's bar or something like that uh down here and it's a bit tricky when you start getting into the welding of uh customized fonts and things like that so that it all goes together and the glowforge reads it properly so it's a little hard to sell the design file from a personalization standpoint but if i do the templates where it's just like the red dragon the emerald dragon the red lion the the griffin whatever it might be whichever mythical beast we decide to put here because these are swappable um i've got like panthers and um griffins and hippogriffs and unicorns and pegasus and all kinds of cool stuff so anyway what i thought i'd do today is show you how to layer this particular sign uses three layers of um the back one is a or sorry the middle one is a walnut ply from columbia forest at home depot and the other two the backer and the top layer is a cherry ply from columbia forest products so yeah anyway i thought i'd show you how to layer it because there's a lot of people who are kind of intimidated by projects like this simply because of the layering process and how you do it maybe it's easy maybe both maybe people think it's easy i don't know i just figured i'd share with you and maybe it'll be inspiration for somebody to try something like this of their own so i'm going to i'm going to show you how to layer this we'll head over to the computer in a quick flash and i'll i'll be using coreldraw so um it probably works the same way in things like inkscape or illustrator or any other graphic program that you might be using but i'm using coreldraw so i'll try to use generic terminology so that if you are using one of those other programs it it still sort of applies i'm not sure if it will i'm not an expert in these things i've been using coreldraw for ages it's a terrible program but you know what it's like you get used to something and you just keep using it so anyway we're going to show you how to layer today okay stick around i'm going to go up to the computer and we're going to rejoin you there see you in a bit okay so we've got our computer on it's sunday morning we've got our coffee we got our graphics program open in this case it's coreldraw and i'll be using coreldraw terminology but it's probably very similar to the terminology you would use or the functions you would use in your graphics program whether it be illustrator or inkscape or whatever so if you have any questions about the stuff that i'm doing or saying leave them in the comments and i'll be sure to help you out in answering those uh those questions you might have okay so i've got coreldraw open and what i've done here is i've got the finished design here on the screen as you can see i've also opened up in coreldraw within a document if i start a new document or new project i can open up multiple pages for different elements of this design in this case what i'm going to do is use the pages for the different layers of this design so that i can then export them as separate files i've got the finished design here what i'm going to do is show you how to layer each of the elements in this so that you can then have things printed or cut or engraved on different layers and then apply a backer so that it pops off like a 3d kind of layered project or finished product so i've got the the pub sign that i'm doing for a friend here what i want to do is make sure that i'm selecting everything that i want on layer one now in this case what i want is all the scroll work i want the hanger holes here i want the lion and the outline of the lion i want the lettons lion and i want the ale spirits wines the little scroll work here and the complete border of the pub sign so what i've done is i've gone ahead and selected all those elements by holding shift down and gathering them all up the way that you do like i can show you how to do that if you like basically you just sort of drag your cursor around the element that you want it selects it and then you would hold your shift key down and then gather up other elements and then it groups them together sort of thing okay and then you can hit ctrl c to copy and then ctrl v to paste so we're gonna copy all the elements for layer one we're gonna head over to page two and as you can see when we paste it it pastes all the things that we want including an e that we don't so we'll get rid of the e this is layer one this is what the glow forge or your laser cutter is going to cut out and engrave out of the material that you use in this case i've used a columbia forest products cherry wood it's a quarter inch plywood and it's a fantastic product if you haven't used it before i highly recommend it really really good uniform quality i love the stuff so and it's a nice good thick product too it's a quarter of an inch so it's sort of you know it has that quality feel to it right so we've got all the elements that we want on layer one okay so we've got the lion the outer the outer edge of this line is going to be a cut the inner detail of this line is going to be an engrave same thing with lettings lion the outer sort of offset here is going to be a cut that's welded to the outer border of the sign and the inner layer is going to be an engrave although the rest of it's just a cut one thing worth noting is if you're going to be using a welded typeface or font here for words that you're including on your sign or your project in general you're going to want to make sure that you use a thicker bolder font and i'll tell you what look the reason being is because a lot of fonts have these skinny elements like in terms of the line here you've got this thick trunk of the end and then you've got these thinner stems that go off into the seraph i'll show you what i mean by when i say that there some fonts don't actually have the ability to uh bold them if you will so let's just type out line here and i'll show you exactly what i mean we want to apply a bit of an outline to certain fonts because sometimes the font is you know it has skinny elements like let's take a look at this one here alex brush this one's got some really super fine detailed sort of uh scroll work in the in the font right which when you're engraving the laser can actually the heat of the laser can burn this completely away like especially when you're looking at things like you know the tail of this this n here uh right here if you're giving if you're getting detailed about this and the font is really small on your project this sort of thing here can get absolutely obliterated and not even show up so just make sure that you're applying it like an outer outline to your to the font that's got those skinny elements and you'll just give it that little bit more durability a little bit more strength so we go ahead and open up the outline tool in your graphics program and we'll just apply an outline to bolster the strength of that uh the thinner elements of your font okay super important to do because otherwise as i've done before in fact the the first iteration of this pub sign that i did had times new roman as this font here the ale spirits and wines and unfortunately what happened was the uh the the thinner elements of these letters actually got completely burned away or almost completely burned away so it kind of didn't really show up on the sign which was kind of disappointing so just a heads up use a bolder or thicker font for fonts that you're going to be welding to lines like this or engraving it or cutting out okay so that's layer one this is the cut layer and the engraved layer that's going to be the the three-dimensional sort of aspect of the sign right that's gonna pop off of the surface of it and as you can see on page one if i skip between the pages you'll see which elements now disappear they're gonna be on other layers so we'll go to page three so i want to actually grab those things right now so we're going to select just drag over the elements that we want making sure that we don't select anything else that we don't want there hold our shift key down and click on the other elements that we want to have on the different layers in this case these two filigree scroll elements here as well as the proprietors portion and the names of the people that we're going to be engraving so we hit copy ctrl c we go over to page three which is our layer two not confusing at all and we're going to drop those elements there now one thing you'll notice here that we haven't done is we haven't transported over the border of the pub sign and that's critical we absolutely have to have that so we need the outer edge and we need these inner circles for the to be cut out of the material so we're going to copy and paste select those copy and we're going to also paste those here do not move it okay so in other words if you get it here don't be moving this don't do this at all okay don't move that pub sign uh border around at all because what will happen is if you move that outer edge these inner elements that you want to score and engrave are going to be off center and they're not going to look great when you this certainly the established in 1983 won't sit directly center with the the shield cut out that's on layer one so just make sure you don't move the outer edge of the pub sign okay but have it on all layers we're going to also place that on layer 4 so we're going to copy those elements again i put the caps lock on instead of hitting shift all right so we copy those and we're going to paste those just get rid of these things here and there we go that's our backer okay so now on each layer each page we have a different layer here's our top layer that's going to be cut and engraved the darker elements of the line here the detail in the middle and the inner part of the lens line text here is going to be engraved the rest of it's going to be cut out of the material page 3 is our layer 2 which has our scroll work here which is going to be scored because it's very detailed now you could use engrave as well at a lower power setting or a higher speed but i've just chosen to use uh the scoring feature because it just it looks nice i think when it's a finished product and we've got our engraved established here with the crown and the engraved proprietors as well so this is all on one layer it doesn't need to be on different layers because it's all appearing in the spaces between the cut layers on layer one okay and then page four we've got our backer so now what we would do is export each of these pages as a pdf or an svg and import them separately into our glowforge software or our laser cutter software so that the the laser knows which ones to cut and score and engrave and that's it now somebody on facebook had asked me how do i create these circles to weld into the the page or sorry the pub sign to in order to hang things from or sort you can put like a chain or a jute rope or a rope or whatever it might be in there to hang it up i'll show you how that's done it's simple it's it's what it's like a welding just the same way i did the scroll work and the uh and the the text down here i'll show you how it's done so essentially what i've got for the hanger here is i've got two concentric circles okay i'm just going to make two exact circles like this and a bigger one on the outside and let's just make sure that those are centered together so i'll just plop it right in the center now what i've done is i've created a space between these the outer diameter of this circle here and the inner diameter of this one that's a quarter of an inch over here okay so this is between here and here is a quarter of an inch and the reason i've done that is for durability i don't want whatever this is hanging from to to sort of rub through the uh the wood here over time so even though this is three layers which adds to the durability i want this to be quite thick so that um so that it's really really durable while still allowing a good sized uh area for something to be threaded through to hang this from okay so we've got our two circles what we want to do now is just make sure that we combine those so that they turn into curves and they they are now one item okay this is now considered one item like a nice donut which would be absolutely delicious on a sunday morning maybe i'll go get myself a donut i'd like i need a donut i don't need a donut what am i doing okay so let's pretend this let's pretend this rectangle here is the edge of the pub sign okay the border of the pub sign or any other element for that matter that you're using so if you want to have this on a i don't know a border like let's say for instance you're making a sign and you want these circles to be the hanger for the sign on the edge of the sign let's do that let's duplicate this ctrl d we'll throw another one over here i'm not being precise but uh you get the idea okay so we got a sign here and these are the hangers and it looks kind of like a frog a little bit maybe no okay so then we're gonna grab all of these elements here and we're going to hit weld and weld is a pretty common element in all graphics programs essentially what it does is it creates a single object out of multiple objects and by making them like you know one outline kind of thing so you can see now that these two circles these two hanger elements are now part of this rectangle okay that's exactly what we've done so just to back up and do it again essentially what i did was had two circles i combined them and then i grabbed all of the elements together and clicked weld and that made those hangers fused to this ranked rectangle so that you can use them uh in any project that you want okay so that's kind of how you layer things at least from a pub sign standpoint i hope this video was in some way helpful maybe even inspirational for you to get going with your own projects that have layers applied to them and if you like this video please comment below hit the like button hit the notification bell so you know when we drop new videos subscribe to the channel because that helps us too and if you want to save some cash on a glow forge of your own if you're not sure whether you want to make the investment trust me you want to make the investment these things are absolutely amazing i can help you out by saving you some cash by using the referral link below in the description you can save yourself off 500 off of a pro like we have here or 250 off of a plus by using that referral code and again we thank you in advance for using it because it helps us out too thank you so much for uh stopping by and watching the video we'll see you on the next one cheers [Music] you

Channel: SteelForge

Views: 34,568

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Id: ZLp6iqaYeVk

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021