Inkscape For Laser Cutting, Beginners Tutorial

hey everybody so making designs for the laser cutter is not actually that difficult all you need to do is learn how to work with flat designs but the laser cutter can be a little bit complicated because you have to use different sorts of data to tell it what it's going to use as a raster which is just kind of scratching across the surface with your image and where it's going to do a cut which defines the path that it's going to follow as it doesn't more intense beam of laser to cut things and so you're going to have to learn just a little bit but honestly it's not that difficult and there are many programs that you can use to create what we call vector graphics vector graphics are the ones that decide the path that it's going to follow now Adobe Illustrator is perhaps the biggest and best-known program for making vector graphics but it's expensive and professional to do that Inkscape on the other hand is a free program and it's still very powerful and very easy to use in fact I find that it's easier to do certain things in Inkscape that I can't even get Adobe Illustrator to do very well like boolean commands but we'll get to those in just a little bit so let's jump over take a look at Inkscape and then we'll discuss it a bit further in the program so now we're looking at Inkscape here and I've got here two smiley faces and looking at these two smiley faces you might think either they're they're identical right but they illustrate the difference between vector and raster graphics now you can't tell at this level but if we zoom in you might start seeing a difference between them notice how the edge of this one on the right looks kind of pixely we'll say the the edges aren't quite sharp but even more than that as they get closer every square is defined by a block of color and each one of these blocks is assigned a different color now adjacent blocks maybe only slightly different and that creates the illusion of a smooth line when you zoom out from it but it's still it's stored as well we call these pixels pixels right next to each other with all of the information that you need now raster graphics are a fantastic way to store picture data you're looking at a raster image in motion right now because it really is not a productive way for the computer to every time it takes a look at your face and snaps a picture says hold on for a second I got to figure out what the shape of this face is and we need to get really really close because we want to make sure to get all that detail you'll notice that these vector graphics they keep their edge constantly that's because they're not defined by pixels what they're defined by if I click on them is a set of points and these points define here where the line is going to go after that point so there's kind of three ideas that you need to understand for vector graphics they are points lines and handles I've got another illustration down here that explains it this is a single line and this line is created with two points but notice how one of these points handles goes off in this direction and the other handle goes off in this direction and the line between them tries to make them well it doesn't try it successfully kind of goes between those two and creates this very interesting shape now it might be a simpler shape that we're making it doesn't need to twist in three directions in fact it might even be if we set it up like this and use our straight line function here boom just a straight line between them and no matter where you try and define these it's just going to be a straight line between them but it's interesting to me I think that they're capable of doing such beautifully and if you really push it complex curves with just two points and some extreme handles between them now when we take a number of points and lines and joy them together they can make longer and more complex surfaces and when we bring them all back together to create a big loop then we get a shape and shapes add two new concepts that we need to talk about that is stroke and fill now this particular shape right here has a black stroke of a thin line and a green fill for laser cutting that is not going to play into the way that it does the laser cutting but it will take the image as you see it an attempt to display it on the raster side of things so it will kind of take this this vector image that you've created and treat it like a raster and try and display it like a raster which can actually be very useful however there can be some gotchas on this one take a look at this line this line has over here in the stroke style here I've given this line a dash so while it is just like the other one a line that's defined by two handles let me move these handles around the show between those handles there are dashes and you might think what I want it to do is I want the laser cutter to go zip zip zip zip zip and and do a dotted perforated cut well it's not gonna do that because to the laser cutter this line is still defined along this path that's connecting these two so it's not defined by the dotted line same way as this line this lines got a different dot and it's not going to be like zib zib zib zib no it's gonna be a continuous cut and even if I try and do something clever like oh I want to have arrow points on the end of my line so as it's doing to cut it no what you need to do is you need to change this you cannot do a line like this but fortunately Inkscape has some tools so let's let's work with this arrow one here I'm going to take the arrow and up and D up in the menu here I'm going to under paths first of all I'm going to change the stroke to path let's see if that does what I want it to yep that did what I wanted to so it turned this shape right here I'm going to change the outline of it if you hold down shift while clicking the colors that changes the outline its outline goes around here this shape its outline goes let's thin that outline out that might be hard to see with a beat so thick its outline goes around the outside of it and then this one back here you created three different shapes with the outlines around them but they are now shapes now it doesn't matter how thick also that we make this line the laser is just gonna follow down the middle of that the thickness of that line is just for you so that you can see it so we could make that point four which is actually much more accurate to how big it's going to try to cut it if you set to a point four millimeters stroke that's pretty much what the laser is is going to cut because the laser is about point four millimeters thick so now if we cut this yes it'll try cutting these all together but it's gonna cut yeah you might have noticed it's gonna cut inside here and it's gonna cut over the top here and in fact it's going to cut right through this because this shape continues here here I'm going to try and move it to the top loops not like that how do we how do we move to the top that's the object if you if you don't know how to do it it's always in the menus there we go raise the top home button next time yeah it's gonna try cutting across the top here and then it's going to cut across the bottom here this is a mess this is a mess but we'll clean this up later let's go back up to our dotted line here we want this to go zip zip zip zip and do a dotted line fine we'll turn our stroke to a path and now let's draw our path on here and make it a point for now it will just kind of oh do you see what it did it it made the individual dotted lines - because I started with a desk let's turn those back into solid there we go so there we go it's turning it into a what it's actually gonna do is it's gonna cut around the edge of this one and around the edge of that one but it's gonna do it very quickly because it's a very small space and so I've seen this effect it's totally cool to go zip zip zip zip and it cuts holes right through perforates it just the way you're looking for so if you leave it as a line with a dash on it you're not gonna get the effect that you want now I want to talk very quickly about creating boolean shapes I said this one's going to be a mess because the head is different and the tail is different yeah that's going to just plain be a mess but it's also you'll notice it's still one object if I click on it it's one object but we can break this apart into different objects by simply going to the object and ungrouping it now it's three separate objects and I can move them around separately and in fact I'm gonna move the head of it just a little bit there and the tail of it just a little bit there now what we want to do is we want to combine these into one shape so just traces around the outside assuming that we want this arrow shape is a terrible arrow shape but nevertheless what we can do is select two of the shapes and up in the path menu go to a union notice how I think that it does a great job of illustrating what we're looking for here the Union takes two shapes and puts them together the difference takes one shape and subtracts the other shape out of it intersection is where those two shapes overlap and it gets rid of everything else exclusion is everything else except for where those two intersect so it's it's very cool Union boom put them together and now if we look at the path for the object it comes in here and goes out there and there's nothing in between this is what we wanted but the heads still separate so let's grab that boolean it here Union them you might have noticed that I'm using two different pointer tools I'm using this pointer tool to grab the object and I'm using this pointer tool to manipulate the end points and lines and handles for the individual line that's that that's the way Inkscape works you've got one arrow pointer up here for grabbing the object and moving it around and you've got another one for up now it automatically switch me to the other one but now I can move the object and now I can click this and I can manipulate the individual elements of the shape now the next function about Inkscape i want to show you guys is is the trace function so here's a here's a handsome picture of a dude with a very happy to have his first 3d printer right there's an old picture of me you can actually take Inkscape and tell it to turn this because this of course is raster okay pixels all over the place but you can tell it to try and make this into a vector and let me show you how to do this you go up to path and you say trace bitmap and this trace bitmap menu comes up now there's lots of ways to do this I'm gonna live preview and I apparently have to reselect this so brightness cutoff says anything that's above a certain brightness we're going to include in our trace and anything that's below it we're gonna just get rid of it for a color image like this this isn't the best choice but if you were simply like tracing a logo this would be a great way to say okay I want I want part of this logo and I want to just kind of trace the edges of it but remember just like our smiley face here there's grays in between and this is how you tell the computer at what point we stop tracing the Grays but that's not gonna work for us edge detection is well it's interesting but we're not gonna worry about that color quantization I'm not really sure what that is so let's go on down here to multiple scans it creates a group of paths we can do it by brightness steps that's okay we can do it by colors ah that's better it looks like it's it's colors in fact we could even do it by grayscale but we'll do colors this time but this this result you'd have to look at it really closely but it doesn't look really good here I'm gonna go ahead and do this one and there's the result of it you might notice that it didn't it kind of worked well if you want it to work even better let's go back to this and let's increase the number of colors it it did eight colors but this has got a lot of color in it so let's let's up that to maybe twenty colors and let's go for it and there we go that's a that's a much it's still a little bit weird looking but that's a much better representation now I'm just gonna close this down for one second but now they're vectors I can go in and I can see where the individual vector paths are and if I wanted to I could cut along those vector paths now this is not something that I would want to do not this example I'll show you a better example in just one second but this might be a way if you've got an image that you're trying to extract something out of because what you can do is come to your object ungroup it and now each of those individual layers are now separate and I can take a look at each one of them separately and say well that one that one's kind of got what I'm looking for that one's maybe a bit more if I make this one black and this one black so that I can compare apples to apples here yeah that one I could see more of my thumbs so I like that one better and just kind of scrub through these layers and see which one has has the shape that you want it's a very cool way I kind of like that last one actually this one right here I don't know why it's just interesting yeah it's it's possible too well not a whole lot there so there we go scrub through these layers and find the one that best matches what you want I did make 20 of them so there we go and we'll get rid of that and we'll get rid of that but let me show you a better use case for let's go back to our smiley face here remember this smiley face is raster graphics but we want it to vectors because we want it to cut around the edge of it or something like that so I will go path I will go trace bitmap I will say you know what I really don't need actually more than two colors so I'll go up to four with it and I'll tell you why in just a little bit maybe I'll take that up to eight okay let's do our trace on it you can hardly tell the difference between these but I think it's interesting that the edge went from being solid black to kind of being grayscale because of the nature of it but okay we're looking for we don't want all eight of these paths we want it to be clean otherwise it'll try cutting over those lines like a time so let's ungroup this and let's start pulling it apart does that one have the shape that we want well it kind of maybe not so much let's try a different one that one definitely is not it ah that one's got more of it but it's not quite right that one's that one's looking pretty good that one's looking even better that one's looking fantastic shoot these are all good I'm gonna grab the gray one cuz I think it's got the thickest line but in fact we don't even need that raster anymore so we'll just put him back away over here but there is a problem with this well it might not be a problem but in this case it is notice that the line on the outside here isn't a single straight line it's an outside edge and an inside edge and that might not be what we want let's pretend in this case that it's not so what do we do about that well real simple we can go in and and this is a fairly they did a good job of making it fairly simple I'm just gonna grab these vertices on the inside just on the inside here and I'm just gonna delete them one at a time to get rid of it now if it's too complex you can simplify the mesh there's a tool under path here for simplify and it will try and reduce the number of points in there and that oftentimes works extremely well all right we're just down to one inside dot there we go and now now we've still got the lines on the inside here but let's say for instance that that oops that that is the cut that we want there we go simplified it down you can edit these points manually by hand and successfully fairly easily so that that I think shows and there we go I'm ready to make it a nice little stencil happy face cut out of it so there we go I hope that that helps you guys now one last word about the colors that you choose for the lines when you do your cuts see a lot of times when you look at a laser-cut design you might think well why aren't the lines that are supposed to be a cut black they want them to cut black means cut but with laser cutters they're oftentimes red or pink or yellow or some light color well remember I said that the laser cutter is going to attempt to take your design as it looks and raster it and sometimes that's what you want you'll put fill in there and you'll say I want to raster this but then afterwards I want to cut around this well if the line that you're trying to cut along is black it's going to raster that line no matter what you do but if it's a lighter color you can filter that one out by using a black-white threshold to say okay you take a look at this and it's all colorful but this is a lighter line so don't raster out the lighter line use that for a cut they also oftentimes have multiple colors for multiple cuts because you want to control your laser cutter and say cut the inside stuff first so that when that stuff falls out it doesn't shift and then cut the outside so that it falls out and they cut the outer most that way it so different colors allows you to control the order of the cut it's it's really a little bit of an art but hopefully I've given you enough of the skills you can download and play with Inkscape and get a little bit at it so that you can make your own design for the laser cutter and start using the laser cutter on a regular basis well I want to thank you very much for watching and if you have any other questions I hope to see you at the makerspace and I will help you through see ya [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Washco Utah Library Makerspace

Views: 65,782

Keywords: Makerspace, laser cutter, diy, how to, inkscape, basics, svg, vector vs raster, raster vs vector, tutorial, svg tutorial, how to design for laser cutting, how to make an svg file

Id: fCw5lE_vbbc

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018