Oversized 3D Acrylic Sign Made with Silhouette Studio and Glowforge - Passthrough Included!

hey everyone it's lisa welcome back to my channel i have a huge project that we're doing today so this is a three by four foot sign this is using acrylic from cerulean tides part of it is acrylic that i custom ordered and part of it is acrylic that i cut using my glowforge so in this video i'm going to be assembling this and showing you how i use the passthrough function to create stencils to put this in the right spot [Music] all right so this is the logo we're working with so um i am working on this for a customer who thankfully also designs they do vinyl cutting but because we're doing this on glowforge we're doing it with acrylic it was with outside of what she was able to do but the benefit is that this is to the dimensions that it needs to be and you'll see that my workspace is set up to 48 inches by 36 inches and that is the size of the piece of acrylic that i have so this is actually set up exactly where it needs to be so all i really need to do is break it apart and start nesting for my letters here i'm not going to cut my letters exactly like this we're going to use the nest feature to make it work and then i will be using pass-through with a big piece of cardboard for my alignment with the cost of acrylic and the cost of lumber going up i want to be as efficient as possible with my materials so i went and ungrouped it once and you can see we have our words right here and our line here so this text here is going to be gray so i'm going to change the colors as i go so here's gray here's gray and then this will be pink and then let me find a cute pink okay now this is going to have a pink background with gray letters so here's the hard part right now is that our letters are set up in the same item so i'm going to right click ungroup let's see so there's our background and then there's our s so i'm going to hold down shift grab s p a [Music] i think i got it there you go oh it was grouped together right so now let's change this over to gray good okay so we still need to do this let's turn that to gray and now we can grab these two circles here and change that to pink now this doesn't affect the cutting in any way but it does make it easier on me so i'm going to right click and group that okay so now we're all ready for this so um i am going to make a copy of this copy and paste this into a new document because i still want to use this for something else but i need to set this up for nesting so we're going to take this entire design move it over and now i'm going to set up my workspace so i'm going to turn off my cutting mat none and i am going to do my material at a width of 11.5 just to give myself a little bit of space for my acrylic and then we do my height at 18. so i have 18 by 11 and a half acrylic sheets from cerulean tights i'll link it below for you and so now i'm going to take the this text right here right click ungroup now you can see all of our letters are right here i'm going to grab all of this go down to the bottom to this little arrow and i want nesting okay so i'm going to use use the cut area and i'm going to select that we're going to increase our padding a little bit to 10 and then i'm going to increase my rotations meaning that they can rotate it as many times as they need to get it to fit so let's nest so let me just make sure a e s t h e t i i c s perfect so it's all nested in there that's all i need so now i can probably fit more within that piece of acrylic so let's just bring that s in there let's ungroup this p and a and put that in there so i'm just going to manually put these in to make it fit better and then the a i can probably rotate and fit right inside that s i'm just trying to make it fit as much as possible letting it go [Music] so let's bring that in here and here is my little line that can go anywhere all right so now we can see what we can fit with this text too so let's go ahead and ungroup it oops and i'm just manually going to try to put as much of this as possible now you can keep nesting but i find that it gets kind of messy and it slows down your machine so i wanted to nest the important word like letters up there and then just set it up like this so let's rotate this a little bit fit it in there and then let's turn this r a little bit all right so i'm just going to set it up like this i want to make sure i'm safe with my acrylic so i'm going to grab all of this right here go to file save selection save the hard drive i'm gonna choose this as an svg and then i'll be right back and i'll set up this next one alrighty so that is saved i'm gonna move this to the side grab my sarasota bring it over here and now i'm literally going to use the same settings and nest it [Music] perfect so this won't use a lot of space at all which is great it gives me a little bit of a buffer in case i get my settings wrong somehow so save selection save the hard drive all right so here's the circle now all i need to do is i need to just save that as spg this line i got as a custom cut from cerulean tights so amanda it's really tight was so awesome she custom cut the large piece of frosted that we're going to attach this to and then she went and custom cut this long line for me so all i have to do is save this pink so i'm just going to save selection and go all right guys i am in select studio i'm going to be setting up my templates to line up my design i'm going to be using cardboard for this i have some i just saved boxes as i go and i have a really nice box that a plant stand came in that will be perfect now you can use different methods to set it up but since i have a large box i'm going to set it up with that in mind so i'm going to do my templates but then i'm also going to show you how i'm going to line up these letters right here so first thing is i'm just going to draw a box now i'm going to manually put in my dimensions so i'm going to have this 48 inches wide and then i'm going to make it about 15 inches tall the first thing i'll do is i'm going to set it up right at the edge of my workspace the way that i am going to align this is that i want the bottom of my box to be exactly at the bottom of this um design so that i know how to set it up and i don't want it to be too too wide so i'm going to just have it overlap these bottom letters here we'll still be able to align it now let me fill this in so you can see so let me do a different color all right so i'm going to take this bring it all the way to the back and then i'm going to make sure my design is grouped so you can see if i select my design the entire thing's grouped so now i can take both of these and i'm already in my modify panel you can see over here on the right and so we are just going to do a subtract all not a subtract the subtract will take away the design on the top we are going to subtract all which is only going to take away the bottom here so let's do that it looks like nothing happened but there you go so this is my first cut we're going to set it up right here and then this design is about three feet so i am going to set up a vertical um guide so let's make this 12 inches wide we don't need it to be too big and then we're going to make this 36 inches we can even make it shorter honestly because we have the the sarasota and the premiere in there we're just trying to line up this circle so i am actually going to take this and bring it down to a line with this line here so i don't have to feed as much through and then line that up with the top so i'm just going to bring this down a little bit so we have more of a buffer and let's fill this in let's do our green again send it to the back right here and same process let's grab both of these subtract all and you have it like this right so we have this right here we don't have to keep everything in there so let's go ahead and take the fill out and so what i need is this outside line and then these letters here i don't even need this bottom bar because this will align right with my line so we're just going to release compound paths or it let's ungroup first all right so we have our own group done so we're going to delete that and then everything inside that circle so my quick way to do that is i'm going to grab everything like this hold down shift grab this outside one that i want to keep and that outside circle and now i can delete now everything in there is set the only other thing that we need to make sure is we need to just keep all this together again so you can see all that set i'm gonna grab this entire design right click and make compound path okay so now let me fill it in so you can see that's our guide there now keep in mind uh just like a little thing about using glowforge software if you're engraving you would have to subtract these through making compound path would actually not work and i'll do another video on that later alright so here are our two guides and then i just need to make one more guide for this so i'm going to grab this right click ungroup select this and so what i need to do is i need to cut out basically this design but i need the letters to be in there too so i'm going to hold down shift click on the gray here ctrl g to group it [Music] and now i can grab it hold down shift click on this back one and subtract we don't need to keep that now this one's all set just do control g group and now we're ready to export our templates so i'm just going to grab each of these and i'm going to do file save selection and name each one for the templates that we have in there so i'm going to do that i'm going to turn on my glowforge and we're going to start setting up to do some pass-through all right so sorry about the weird camera angles it just kind of happens i have a small space for pass-through so here is my box this is from a plant stand that i got from aldi the other week and um thankfully i still had it in my garage and it's going to be the perfect size to make my guides so first things first i'm going to get rid of this tape and we're essentially just going to break this box down [Music] okay so now we just need to make sure we have the right size for this yep this will be good just kind of bring that down a little [Music] bit and this will be a good size for the bottom one so literally just use my scissors and cut it down all right so that is our piece so i'm going to move my camera so you can see how i feed this in and then i'll show you my software how i set up my design alright so here is my cardboard so with pass-through you feed it in from the back first so we're going to go into our pass-through slot it's going to give us a little bit of trouble because we have that lip so you can see i just moved my uh arm so i'm going to turn off my machine so i don't want to move it while it's on pop that back down and go from here so when you do this keep your machine off when you start it okay so now i tucked in my edges right here now i'm good to turn this back on close my lid and then we're all set there okay so you can see right here as i'm going i already cut my template here i just set it up like that so i'm going to grab all of this in here delete it this is my test square i can delete that now too and i'm going to start uploading my svg files so i'm going to do my bottom one first so bottom template open that and then we are also going to turn on pro pass through right here so you can see when you turn on pro pass through your view changes and now i can take my design i'm going to rotate it using this little arrow oops that's too much but zoom out okay so we're going to turn on pro pass through [Music] and let's rotate this design there's my rotate button i'm holding down shift so it rotates in 45 degree increments right so we're all set there and now before i do anything else i'm going to take the three dots set my focus to the cardboard that way it gets the height correct [Music] okay so now we can adjust it let's go ahead bring this over i want to make sure it stays on my cardboard oh i should enter my settings i was wondering why it wasn't working all right so now we'll do our cardboard settings i test cut a bunch so make sure you keep test cutting but we're going to cut this and then right now i'm using my speed at 180 and 90 for my power and these little pieces kind of got stuck in there because it wasn't grouped we could just leave it alright so i'm going to nudge this down as much as i can just because i want to maximize my space and now i'm ready to print [Music] so this is going to prepare it it's going to take a couple stages you know we're doing a big job here all right so this will take two minutes for this one all right so you'll see we're taking pictures don't move anything just let this go so the thing that surprised me about pass-through is that it takes a lot longer than i thought right so now we're going to shift it forward about eight inches the top should be about three inches from the bottom so we're just going to keep feeding that should be good so now let's go ahead and continue now this is going to align it for me okay you can see the alignment now check this out sometimes it looks off just trust what glowforge is doing so we're going to go ahead and continue i'm just going to set up my next print all right so we have one minute on this [Music] all right so you can see it's going to take pictures now and it's going to repeat the process so i'm going to keep going i'm not going to commentary the rest of this and um i'll see you when we're done with this cut [Music] okay we are all done so you'll notice that um it's not like cut through all the way that happens this is coated so um we might need to just pop it out it's really not a big deal because it pops out really easily so it's not like wood where if it doesn't cut through all the way you know not great i'm literally just going to rip it off it's almost like perforating it pick that up later now this start to finish took about an hour um it probably would take a lot would have been a little shorter had i not had those alignment issues at the beginning and again that's the hour from setting up my design so something of this size it does take a little bit of time because it's like five or six minutes for each alignment so we'll you know keep that in mind like the bigger signs you do are beautiful but do factor in the time it takes to do that so we're just taking that up okay so this is how it's going to align this will go right on the bottom and now i can pop out these other parts [Music] and this one we do want to make sure we get that cardboard out because we're going to put the 3m down and so we want to make sure we're not getting cardboard down underneath our acrylic all right so here is the board now i did have to pop these out you know it's kind of a trade-off so if you don't want to pop these out you do run the risk of all these little pieces kind of coming loose as you're sliding your pass through so for me it worked out now if you're doing wood you want to reevaluate it so make sure you're testing your settings make sure you're getting good cuts but that's that i'm going gonna go ahead and set up my second one and then i'll see you when i start assembling okay so i have my cardboard template cut right here and i cut all of the pieces using my glowforge and they're backed with 3m so essentially we're doing like a puzzle so the first thing that i want to do is i need to line up my letters on this circle that's going on the side so i cut this cardboard template to be the same size as it as it and i will be taping it on so basically line it up and i'm just using painters tape you guys know i use this for everything and we're going to painters tape that on there and this next part is super easy okay so we have our guide right there i'm going to keep the masking on as long as possible and so first i'll peel this 3m i ordered a big roll of it from tape case i also have some that you can buy on amazon i'll link it in the description for you okay so there's that and it'll fit right into this template push down cool so now we're just going to do the next ones just peeling off the 3m so i cut this acrylic on my glowforge with the 3m on it so i put the 3m on the sheet and i actually mirrored my entire design and cut with the 3m side facing up so that made sure that i was actually cutting through it i've had issues where i put 3m on the bottom and it doesn't cut through the very bottom and when it doesn't cut through the 3m then like what's the point right all right so there's my gray just replacing it on there and now this is a really tiny piece we're gonna peel this one off and place it right in there and for the rest of the side i'm just going to leave the masking on but for the first ones you can see i'll peel this off so you can see what it'll look like so i got my acrylic from cerulean tides i think i've mentioned it before what i like about getting it from there is that the majority of your acrylic will come paper mask so it's super easy to just put it in your machine and go and so that helps get cleaner cuts and it also helps prevent getting flashback and that's where your laser kind of hits the bottom of your chrome tray and singes the back of your material so it helps prevent all of that all right so this is the last one [Music] all right so we'll just peel our tape off we're going to keep the rest of these pieces though because i'm going to use it for my big alignment [Music] there we go that's the first part so i'll be right back with the big sign and we're going to start aligning everything on the big sign so here is my piece of acrylic now this is frosted acrylic from cerulean tides i special ordered this so that's something that's really cool that they do is that you can special order a certain size and they put holes in the corners for my standoffs so all i have to do is put these on so here is my piece of cardboard remember that i set it up to line up with the bottom so we're going to line it up right here set up my corners this piece is cut just wider than what i have so i'm just going back and forth to make sure that it's set up in the same spot and i'm going to bring this down and line up my cardboard with the bottom so once i have that lined up like always i'm going to use my painters tape and before i put it down i'm just going to check one more time so we're good there and then we'll do it on this side too [Music] all right so now it's just peel and stick so i'm going to fast forward going through this but it's the same thing just using my 3m peeling the backing and placing it on all right so i'm going to take this template off but i'm still going to hold on to it because i need to put the line in this line i had custom cut from cerulean tides and i don't have 3m on it so i will need to glue it but not right now all right so i'm going to gently lift up this cardboard making sure i don't have it underneath my acrylic like that eye was and this e [Music] we're gently lifting there we go just need to adjust this little a it shifted on me no big deal just gonna pop it right back in there press down hard and then lift cool so i'm going to you know make sure i press down more later make sure i get it all set but now i have my preliminary so now i can take this one and this guide i won't have to take down at all because it's fitting right in to where it lines up so now i can grab the ring you can see it'll fit right here so i just need to go through and peel off my 3m now this is actually eighth of an inch this is cotton candy from cerulean tides and unfortunately it didn't come in a quarter inch so we did an eighth of an inch and we just stacked it alright so now we're going to set that up [Music] so we have that in there and now i can use this ring from my guide to figure out my spacing between it [Music] and now here's my center so now that i have it safely assembled i'm going to remove this cardboard i don't need it anymore and now we can peel off this 3m all right so the last step we're just popping that in there then i'm going to use my weeding tool to just pop out this stuff this cardboard ring before it somehow gets stuck underneath it cool so now we have that all set all i need to do is peel off this masking and glue down that line and then we'll be all set to go so i'm going to finish that up and i will see you with the finished product all right guys here is my final product i'm super proud of it this is my biggest project yet so don't forget this is custom acrylic from cerulean tides you can use code pots perfect pen to get 10 off your order over 100 and if you're watching this and you're still thinking about getting a glowforge check out the link in my description to save 500 on a new machine and don't forget to like and subscribe you

Channel: Lisa Potts Designs

Views: 24,348

Keywords: glowforge, glowforge training, silhouette, silhouette studio, silhouette cameo, lisa potts, lisa potts designs, training, tutorials, how to, education, crafts, crafty, vinyl, htv, decals, rhinestones, acrylic, sign, DIY, nesting, passthrough, glowforge pro

Id: 5L1M0UATTiY

Length: 29min 52sec (1792 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021