Lightburn Tutorial: Transforming text on paths with Lightburn

in this video we're going to go through how you can manipulate fonts and text in light burn [Music] hi my name is gil and in this second part of this tutorial we're going to look at everything you need to know to make sure that your text layout and editing is as creative as you want it to be in light burn for this part of the tutorial we're going to be concentrating on all the tools will allow you to change your text from a common straight line into something dynamic and eye-catching to show you these tools we are going to move fast and jump straight into the workspace in light burn but before we dive in let me invite you to hit that subscribe button and bell icon so you don't miss out on any of the upcoming videos and tutorials based around lasers and light burn i also want to personally invite you to come along to the laser live streams we host on this channel where you can show off your successful projects and meet fellow laserologists who can help out with exploring how to get the most out of your software and equipment once this video is finished feel free to jump over to our facebook group and introduce yourself the link to the group is in the description below and i look forward to meeting you and seeing what you create with your laser also stick around to the end where i'll be putting together a live project showing you a practical example on how to use these text and path tools in a project but for now let's jump into light burn so we can take your text designs to the next level let's just go through some of the options that we have as we were saying before we can pick different fonts and we can use whatever font is available on the system or we can define those sxh files at this point i'm just going to use let's go find something that's a little fancy let's go boston traffic looks a little bit like a stencil we're good with that let's go select it we'll make it just a little bit bigger love love love how that how you can resize things so quickly or stick it in the middle and let's start looking at some of the options in the menu up the top so the first thing we can do is we can actually bold it and in this case this font doesn't have a bowl but it does have an italics so you can see by just clicking on that little slider bang it just shifts it off to the side which again is a really neat little trick that you can use when you're designing your signs or your logos or anything else that you want to place onto some material you also have an uppercase option now with this font it's not going to work so let's turn that off let's go select a different font let's go basketville all right so let's go first of all bold well it's not going to do that but let's go uppercase and bang you can see look at the difference size-wise large fonts is usually what the font height is actually looking at in light burn if you are toggling from uppercase to lowercase you're going to see quite a jump when it comes to size we've dealt with right to left but we've also got welded and welded we're going to touch upon you know in a short while because it's very interesting especially when you start manipulating the text you also have height space so you can actually widen the text i know that sometimes you want to get spacing so you can go into the negative which is going to squash it all up or you can make it wider that's i'm just curious if i turn the welding off wow you can see yeah you see what's going on here let me just zoom in this is kind of really important you see how that r and that t are going across the e here it's it's like if i'm gonna actually go and let's see yeah we're gonna actually get a lot of crossover the laser actually burning the t area here and that little tail on the t on the r itself but if i hit the welded bang it actually welds all the cross over front information together so welded is one of those really fun features when it came out boy were people like super happy one of the really easy way to get flowing script is just kind of smoosh it up using the h space and then just turn on welded and you've now got a continuous cut even though so that's a a really nice way of being able to i guess weld your fonts together but it's almost like making it seamless if that for whatever reason is not what you want turn the welded off and then you'll get all that other information there you can crush it as much as you want in fact if we willed it yeah you can still kind of see kind of a unique you're losing some information in here that's for sure but it's a very interesting design choice so there you go there i knew we're going to touch on welded the other thing that you can do let's go back to zero here and we'll zoom out now let's also look at what the vertical space does and that just moves it up or down so again if you want some very unique kind of movement especially if you're working on a path this using the v space the vertical space you can actually dial in exactly what it you want so you've got full control over that now something else that's really kind of fun is you have these aligns and we're going to touch on on that in a second we're going to actually change this font so now we've got the font i put it back into american typewriter and i want to show you some of the manipulations that you can do with the fonts itself so one of the first things you can do is when if you select your your text you'll see a little blue ball here and that allows you to actually bend your text around an imaginary circle and that circle is defined by the length of your font so if we actually go and make this a little bit smaller you'll see that it also changes the diameter of how the text actually goes around and this is this is something that light burn has instituted a few versions ago i love this i really do enjoy being able to to work with this get back out of that so let's say you want to just a slight bend there you go we've now got that text very quickly bent around the diameter of the text itself which is a lot of fun but maybe you want to do something that is very very significant in the sense of working on a path maybe just working pulling something down like this is not going to work for you but then again you know what you could get a little creative see if i can uh get our piece of a ball here and let's see if we can get let's make it a little bit bigger just playing around with this right now i love playing with life and it always teaches me something new and i want to grab this text again and i'm like yeah close if especially for a mock-up that kind of works for me and then i could get really creative and start hitting some uh let's go inward well make that four start building maybe put a some line art in there or something like that that looks great it's starting to build something that we weren't able to if we weren't using these tools let's get rid of this again let's go back and put this onto the default i want to show you some of the other things that you can do just using that push and pull blue ball that comes up now remember we're looking here at the line x and the line y and well we can actually move that to the left if i pull this over across the ball has now moved and check out what happens it's almost as if that on the left hand side is the start and that sphere that imaginary sphere is all the way across and we can actually kind of pull this right across and what's kind of fun about this is you can also kind of just spin it around so maybe it's not not exactly the way you want to do it you can resize it of course or you could leave it in its original form so by moving the center point the align point to the left it allows you to be able to move that across we do it for the right it's the opposite but you can see here the last font it's like a dragon's tail guys this is awesome the actual anchor point is now to the right so oh i want to capture this this i could i could do an animation just for this this is like laser live stream watch you from oh light burn wow maybe i should do that as the opening for my last live stream [Music] welcome there's a live stream kind of looks cool um i could do that in after effects too but it's kind of more fun using light burn just another application you got light burn for all your video graphic needs going back to the tutorial though we can change that we can also change the alignment i just put it in the middle so let's just get that straight actually we'll just undo there you go got that in the right place now put that align in the middle and we're going to align the top and check this out now we are going again back and forth this is the line y so that's the top that's the bottom they're not doing anything too drastic but when you align them with the other ones you can start seeing you can change a lot of the uh the motion it's kind of fun surprise myself now there's one last drop down here and that is text there's you can change text to date merge it with a spreadsheet serial numbers and cutting settings i'm going to look at those advanced settings in another tutorial just want to go through these things first because i think these are really fun tools that gets people to to create really really quickly so let me go and grab another go laser live stream we'll just reset that so now that is all on the same area but maybe just bending the text is not really what you you want to do maybe you've got some maybe you want some text to follow a logo design or something that's very specific to your needs well you can do that as well as i said you can see we've got the ball here we can push and pull we don't want to do that what you can actually do is you can align text to a path and by you can do that by grabbing the pen tool and drawing a path what i'm going to do now is just hit the escape we're going to select it and then we're going to go up to the node edit and in here you can do a whole bunch of things if you want the path to be sharp you can just stick in a few points and push and pull them so you know and we can select this then hold shift select your text and then by hitting the right button or the control click we can apply the path to the text you can see here bang we now have text that is following the line now that's one way of being able to do it we'll just undo it right now and i'm going to show you guys also when you've got those node points we can go back into edit node i'm going to hit the s which is a smooth out function let's grab this one too and hit that one and now you can see i've got a nice little curve i'm going to now hit the select select the letters and i'm going to apply the the text to the path again if i deselect everything but i just grab the path i have the option to be able to go into the edit node again i can start pushing pulling all the text so if i have something really specific that i want to do i'm able to do it i can resize that i can move the text back and forth it's really not a problem this gives you a lot of options when you're actually working with some text now i know you're all sitting here going that's really good girl i like that i haven't played with it but i'm going to but you know what i realized guilt when you're gonna go and burn this onto a piece of material you're gonna have a line right through it and you're right i am if i leave it that way but i'm going to use my favorite so i'm going to select that line and i'm going to make it a tool layer in case what's going to happen now bang i've got my text following a path that i can use so those features are really really simple i invite everyone to go and practice them because that's going to open up your ability to be able to create designs within light burn and not having to use third-party software this is incredibly exciting i actually use a lot of this sort of stuff myself and then i export it out because it's just so much fun to be able to use within light burn so right now you have all the info you need on the different path and text tools in light burn that's great but if you want to master something it's always best to apply what you've learned into a project so that's what we're going to do right now let's jump back into light burn and see what we can create so in this example i'm just going to talk out loud about what i'm actually going to do so my idea here is to create some sort of new alternate logo and given the fact that we are such good friends with light burn such a great product i'm gonna give that a shot so the very first thing i'm gonna do is go into the window go into my art library where i've collected a few logos and i've actually grabbed the light burn dragon and there he is let's just go resize him a little bit and i'm thinking to myself the logo for light burns really cool but if you saw the dragon for the very first time maybe you wouldn't know what it is so let's see if we can use some of the tools that we've been looking at and see if we can get some text to go around this logo i mean we could alternatively just go light burn and i'm going to use the strike lord text that i've got and we could we could we could leave it like that i mean you know there's nothing wrong with that we can go to a preview uh it's in a fill that's pretty striking if you saw that maybe we could change the color maybe we can engrave that on some material but i want to get a little bit more creative with some of the tools and also show you guys what's going on so let's grab the light button let's move them over to the side and let's let's concentrate on the dragon here okay so there's a number of things that i could do here with the dragon i could start using some of these basic tools i could grab let's say a circle let's see if i can select it convert it to a path there we go we've got some node points i can always insert a node point by pressing i gives me a little bit more of an option i'm gonna grab it when i start sizing it just generally around a little bit like an egg well that's kind of cool i like that a little bit of an egg shape here we we don't want to leave it on the fill line because if it's the fill oh actually that looks chewy that looks good and you know in a case we're not using the tools but if we actually just did it like that move it back i use a trackpad guys so sometimes my fingers don't i'm touching the trackpad it drags it on that's that's something interesting i kind of like that not what i was going for and obviously i haven't used any of the tools text tools that we're talking about but what i'm going to do is i'm just going to quickly save this i'll save as we're gonna call this uh light burn two because i like that as kind of design that looks kind of cool i can actually just grab that dot and just let's see if we can make it kind of come up towards a curve i mean it's a slight thing but it does make it pop a little bit more i like that too how about we save that one as i burn three and i do this quite often when i'm trying to work out a design i also like the fact that i'm just using one set of settings so if i can just go into the power and speed grab whatever i need to do out of the library here and i'm ready to go oh you know what i really do like that i'm gonna i'm i think i'm gonna file that in my head i think there's definitely stuff we can do with that that is not really using the tools so let's undo the turn let's get rid of the ellipse and again we can change that ellipse any way we want we could actually you know if i wanted to make it a little bit longer i can actually smooth this out by hitting s see that it just smoothed out that point you know you can get some really great shapes this way of course we can push and pull this as well so we can we can make something that's really unique but i want to i want to create something fast i want to go and give oz down at light burn a number of options really quickly so what i'm going to do is use some of the tools that we were talking about and instead of drawing a path i'm going to use the offset shapes tool here to kind of cheat and do some of the work so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select the dragon i'm going to hit the offset and in this case i'm going to make the offset 7 mils you can make it more or less i was playing with this before you'll see why i'm picking seven i got very lucky with this size let's hit okay you can see there's got to be a little bit of cleanup here i'm going to select that outer pathway and the first thing i'm going to do is make it a tool layer that way we have no problem with the letters going around and actually engraving another line in here too i'm going to grab the areas that were offset and i'm going to come up here and split them up into individuals and then i'm going to just select that middle one and pop it out because we don't really need it it's just a lot of information and i just like doing things really cleanly so at this point i have a line some text i'm going to select that line i'm going to then select my text i'm now going to right click or ctrl click and it says apply text to path and watch what's going to happen here it's going to be kind of interesting what we've got now is we've got these letters lined up with the tail end of the dragon and i can select this and change where i want this orientation to be that's in the left that's the right we put it in the middle it's looking good remember we were talking about the y axis before check this out because i couldn't show it to you earlier very cleanly but if i go to the top it actually pops those letters out to the top of the path really important to understand so if we look at the preview here we've got some distance away from the dragon if we actually put that back into the middle and show that on the preview we actually have the letters connected to that dragon tail one of the things i'm going to do just now for the sake of this preview is i'm going to place those letters on a different layer and that is already a line layer so if we go back in here we can see that they're still connected but they are actually a different context let's keep going back let's i'll show you the bottom and the bottom part is actually going to now have those letters aligned to the bottom of the path here but in the actual dragon itself so again if we preview it we've only got half the letters in there that's a much better way of understanding the align y we're back to the middle i got very lucky with the height and the distance of that path that was not pre-planned but it's something that if you keep in mind you can definitely work with let's go back to preview that looks pretty good but i actually want the letters further down into this area so it's kind of like to the bottom of the logo how do i do that in light burn itself there are no real ways to be able to push and pull it i can grab the path and i can turn it around but in this case it's actually going to cut into the image because the path is literally cloned off the actual space itself and unfortunately when you grab the text you can't really push and pull it along with some sliders it doesn't really give you that option so what i'm going to do is just this is kind of the simplest way that i've been able to do it is to go into the text option put my cursor there and just give it a few spaces i'm hitting the space bar you can see i can align pretty much exactly where i want it and there you go i've got light burn in that lower area that i actually wanted it to be and if i wanted to change that that's cool too i can come back in here i can grab that text i can remove as many as i want or i could even slide it all anywhere along that space and if i wanted it to go across let's say maybe where the start of the tail is i can change that align grab him and then it will be upside down so you've got a lot of power to be able to go and do that it's it's a very simple way of being able to kind of manipulate text you can see we did this live i explained it literally my thoughts as i was creating this piece and you can see how fast you can come up with three or four different designs in light burn itself it'll be interesting to see what uh oz thinks about this maybe this is the futuristic version of light burn i don't know it's a lot of fun to be able to go and take different designs and play with them incredible design tools especially when you're manipulating text and working on paths very very quick way of being able to get text to follow a shape that you are working with within the logo all right now we have the tools in light burn to create any creative text you need to complete your projects hopefully the light burn logo examples i created show you that in a very short time you can create something unique and individual for your laser project all it takes is some understanding of the tools and a little bit of practice i would love to see what you create with these text and path tools so feel free to post your results in the laser livestream facebook group till i get a chance to see what you've made check out these videos right here and you know what i know you're gonna go and make something amazing i'll see you on the next video have fun

Channel: Gil Poznanski

Views: 1,070

Keywords: Lightburn Tutorial: Transforming text with paths, Transforming text with paths, Transforming text on paths with Lightburn, text with paths lightburn, text and paths lightburn, Modify text lightburn, manipulate text in lightburn, master text and fonts in lightburn, Lightburn text and fonts, text and fonts Lightburn, using text in lightburn, text lightburn, edit text in lightburn, using fonts in Lightburn

Id: sBJvokoGv4M

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 28 2021