Designer; Creating "pieces" for laser cutting that share borders.

[Steve_N]

Hello everyone,

I am currently trialing Affinity Designer with a view to purchase. I have "dabbled" with Illustrator over the years  (still have an old cs3 version) but never really had a need to use it above just curiosity level and the odd live trace.

Recently my partner and I started a venture which requires me to re-illustrate hand drawn designs. I have searched high and low for information relating to creating "adjoining pieces" from a finished vector illustration, which need to be cut from different coloured acrylic/wood panels. This means that the pieces which share a border need to be an exact cut-line overlap, so that when the craft piece is assembled, it all fits together perfectly seemless with all the multi coloured "parts".

So my question is; could somebody point me in the direction of information which could allow me to achieve this with Affinity Designer? Or perhaps be kind enough to explain if it either would, or would not currently be easy to do in Designer. Especially if it would mean a huge amount of time-consuming workarounds.

My current workflow;
1. Scan in the hand drawn image and place it in a new file.
2. Use the pen tool to draw and outline the sections, and brush tool to create broader laser etching areas.
3. Touch up the illustration and align junction points of individual section paths.

After this, I  can't seem to find a method for being able to "piece out" all the odd shaped sections as many of them share path lines. Will I literally need to make sure each shared cut line is sized and duplicated perfectly then join a "copy" of each path line to each half of the layout pieces?

The point of this is not to be able to colourize the sections but to lay them out on different coloured cutting sheets ready for laser cutting.

Thanks for any insights or advise folks may be able to share on this.

[dutchshader]

i think the best way is to duplicate and substract a lot.

[gdenby]

Hi, Steve_N,

As a preface, there have been a number of posts by people using, or trying to use vinyl cutters, laser cutter, plotters. The issues faced seem to be that those pieces of hardware have device dependent drivers, and the drivers have to be able to interpret the graphic output. You might want to check what the laser cutter requires, or if the manufacturer says they support file types Affinity creates.

I'm a little unclear about what you intend to do. Specifically, "brush tool to create broader laser etching areas." Designer has a pixel brush, which I don't think would produce anything you want. It also has a "vector brush" but that just stretches or repeats a bitmap image along a vector path. 

Essentially, Designer works with areas, and assigns lines and fills to them. You would want to do all your tracing work w. the pen or pencil tool to define those areas.

What dutchshader shows is 1 method. I'm posting the results of another. I started w. a hand and forearm outline, a silhouette. I copied it just in case I messed something up. I then drew a quadrangular shape around a finger, and did a divide operation. I was left with a piece cut away from the forearm/hand, the finger, the rest of the forearm, and the leftover of the quadrangle. That I deleted.

Repeat. Note, straight lines and smooth curves tend to produce good results. Wavery lines can produce problematic results.  I don't know that they would produce unacceptable cuts w. a laser. A couple I looked at from other files and the nodes were at  the same position to .009 inch, but there were quite a lot of them near where the vectors intersected.

So I worked in an opposite direct from what you are proposing. I started w. 1 big part, and started cutting it into pieces. Working to put pieces together is much harder. I did spend quite a large amount of time early on trying to match the edges off single shapes into seamless larger forms. I went back and looked at some of them a few weeks ago, and at this point was able to pick out and remedy the flaws (which I did not know existed) fairly quickly. 

 

[firstdefence]

I think to fully understand what you want a sample file would be nice. but if interlocking blocks, however intricate are your main goal then I would go with Dutchshaders method, this way you can colour each section with the colour you are going to export too. As gdenby has mentioned once you have your finished art you can duplicate it so you have a copy, then you can break the other one into its respective colour groups and arrange them for a more efficient cut and to minimise wastage.

[JimmyJack]

I have a different interpretation of your starting point. If it's like the beginning of this GIF then there's no reason you can't do this in just a couple steps... regardless (within reason) of piece count (... because of a couple of Affinity peculiarities the process should actually be simpler than it is). Process after the GIF:
FYI...The process does, however, leave a "tiny" (up to you how small) channel in-between objects. My quick example it's ~5/1000mm. I'm sure you could go smaller is needed .

But I also don't understand this part of your description, "....and brush tool to create broader laser etching areas"

The idea is simple: 
Select all your lines give them a tiny stroke
Expand stroke
Boolean Add all
Boolean divide
Discard the big piece on the bottom
Done

BUT.... Affinity gives bad results expanding "tiny" strokes. 
So:
Select all your lines 
Resize them to something HUGE. (like this)
Edit: well maybe not THAT big. Tried it.... too many nodes. Go just big enough to make it work. Might take an experiment of two.

Give them all a "reasonable" stroke. I used 1. (and check the Mitre to make sure any corners are sharp)
Expand stroke
Boolean Add all
Boolean divide
Discard the big piece on the bottom
Shrink all the parts back down
Done

Oh and Affinity also likes to expand strokes with an excessive number of nodes. On a simple line style it might not be so bad.
Just keep in mind, the bigger you go to more nodes you'll get!
This hopefully will be fixed in v1.7. (....or I'm outta here )

 

[Steve_N]

On 11/12/2018 at 11:20 PM, dutchshader said:

i think the best way is to duplicate and substract a lot.

Thanks for the video dutchshader, I hear where you're coming from here. Looks like there's some good time spending for me ahead.

On 11/13/2018 at 2:01 AM, gdenby said:

Hi, Steve_N,

I'm a little unclear about what you intend to do. Specifically, "brush tool to create broader laser etching areas." Designer has a pixel brush, which I don't think would produce anything you want. It also has a "vector brush" but that just stretches or repeats a bitmap image along a vector path. 
Essentially, Designer works with areas, and assigns lines and fills to them. You would want to do all your tracing work w. the pen or pencil tool to define those areas.
Sorry, I really should have left this part out as it's not that relevant to what I'm primarily trying to achieve with this post. I understand a mojority of the tool function differences.

What dutchshader shows is 1 method. I'm posting the results of another.
Great, it's good for me to have more ideas.
I started w. a hand and forearm outline, a silhouette. I copied it just in case I messed something up. I then drew a quadrangular shape around a finger, and did a divide operation. I was left with a piece cut away from the forearm/hand, the finger, the rest of the forearm, and the leftover of the quadrangle. That I deleted.

Repeat. Note, straight lines and smooth curves tend to produce good results. Wavery lines can produce problematic results.  I don't know that they would produce unacceptable cuts w. a laser. A couple I looked at from other files and the nodes were at  the same position to .009 inch, but there were quite a lot of them near where the vectors intersected.
Ok, got it. This and dutchshader's feedback tells me that the process is fairly laborious either way.

So I worked in an opposite direct from what you are proposing. I started w. 1 big part, and started cutting it into pieces. Working to put pieces together is much harder. I did spend quite a large amount of time early on trying to match the edges off single shapes into seamless larger forms. I went back and looked at some of them a few weeks ago, and at this point was able to pick out and remedy the flaws (which I did not know existed) fairly quickly. 
Fair enough. Thanks for your workflow ideas, it helps. The cutter's laser cuts at approximately a 0.1pt width (around 0.04mm). I guess I'll just have to check all bordering lines against each other closely after dividing the sections.

Thank you gdenby. Responses above in dark orange.

On 11/13/2018 at 2:45 AM, firstdefence said:

I think to fully understand what you want a sample file would be nice. but if interlocking blocks, however intricate are your main goal then I would go with Dutchshaders method, this way you can colour each section with the colour you are going to export too. As gdenby has mentioned once you have your finished art you can duplicate it so you have a copy, then you can break the other one into its respective colour groups and arrange them for a more efficient cut and to minimise wastage.

Thanks firstdefence. I hear you on all your points.

-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  - 
Here's what the laser cutter specifies as vector file requirements. 3 colours: red = cutting, black = raster etching and blue = vector etching. The red cutting line is 0.1pt. And I'm ok with getting that all setup for them.

As expressed by most of you above, my initial challenge was trying to decide if I should outline the total image first, then add internal section lines, or vice-versa. In the end I just did whatever flowed then have planned to break and join paths as necessary. Sections like around the eye will have a combination of small acrylic pieces with etched indents that end up painted. Like the pupil, curved line under the eye and the foot-claws.

I can see that the sectioning process is going to take a lot longer than initially hoped.

[JimmyJack]

29 minutes ago, Steve_N said:

I can see that the sectioning process is going to take a lot longer than initially hoped. 

@Steve_N I really don't think so. Whole thing should take but a couple minutes. 

Just need one added step. Make a copy of the strokes before expanding.

[Steve_N]

22 minutes ago, JimmyJack said:

I have a different interpretation of your starting point. 
Nice breakdown. Thank you.

But I also don't understand this part of your description, "....and brush tool to create broader laser etching areas"
It's ok. I was just adding in a little more detail than was probably necessary for this post. My reference was simply a separate process which would allow me to include broad raster based lines (like for the crease lines of clothing) that the laser cutters program would read as "etching sections"

Great post also Jimmy Jack. I'll need to sit down and experiment with all of these suggestions to see how i can streamline it for how my brain processes things (often it's just in buffering overload mode  ). I'll post back here once i've had time to go through it all.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

[Steve_N]

Just now, JimmyJack said:

@Steve_N I really don't think so. Whole thing should take but a couple minutes. 

Ok thanks Jimmy. See above, you keep beating me to a reply  

[JimmyJack]

@Steve_N If you care to post the rooster. I can see if I can put my big mouth to the test! 

[Steve_N]

Hi folks, I wanted to take a quick moment to thank everbody for their help and suggestions on getting this done. I thought it would be the right thing to do to add info that worked for me in the end.

Also, a big thumbs up to @JimmyJack for going above and beyond with some off-forum assistance. This really helped shed some light on a few program oddities while getting accurate sections.

For anybody looking to do this type of process while preparing files for laser cutting, basically Jimmy's post above with the four steps is essentially what will get you there reasonably quickly, but with a few specific caveats which I experienced (your mileage may vary though):

1. Make sure before you expand stroke, you have stroke set to solid line. This is probably obvious to most, and although I remember setting mine to solid, somewhere through the process it changed to "brush" and this gave different/inconsistent results (this makes sense since the brush will have variation on the edge feathering and distance). 

2. Be very specific about the line width when resizing up to get accurate paths following the stroke. For me, I needed the section to finish up with a 0.1pt stroke for the cutter to follow. So I had to make sure I manually changed the stroke width to x20 (2.0), so that when I did an exact x20 resize of the image, it would be exactly 0.1pt when scaled back down. If I used "scale with object". I ended up with a 2.1pt stroke instead of 2.0pt. Odd but true. Something tells me that the results may be slightly different depending on the original size of you artwork to begin with.

3. When resizing the artwork, keep the expand anchor point set to centre. Again, this may or may not be obvious to more seasoned illustrators, but I seemed to get ever so slightly different results when the anchor point was set to top-left as opposed to the centre.

Many thanks.  

 

 

[JimmyJack]

Hi @Steve_N thanks for the shout out. Glad to help.

However, the red lines still look quite a bit offset. 

[Steve_N]

2 minutes ago, JimmyJack said:

Hi @Steve_N thanks for the shout out. Glad to help.

However, that red lines still look quite a bit offset. 

@JimmyJack Cool, although can you define what you mean? Are you referring; It's still offset after getting it to replicate your outcome, or am I missing a different reference?  

[JimmyJack]

9 minutes ago, Steve_N said:

@JimmyJack Cool, although can you define what you mean? Are you referring; It's still offset after getting it to replicate your outcome, or am I missing a different reference?  

Wasn't there an image attached to the last post? 
Anyway, I was referring to the red .1 strokes in between all the pieces. In what (I thought) I saw, they seemed off. Not where we left off last.
I assume it's okay because of what you wrote. You know where you can find me.

[Steve_N]

10 minutes ago, JimmyJack said:

You know where you can find me

Yessir, I do.  

Ah, now I see the confusion. Yes the acciedently posted image was a version before sorting out the anomolies. For some reason images from our older interactions were added back into the post, even though I removed them. It wasn't visable when I hit send.  Anyway, I went back in and edited the post.

[JimmyJack]

Phew. I got a little worried . Glad you're good!