Victoria Tran: Week 10 - Laser Engraved Mountains Landscape

I wanted to take advantage of the rastering affect the laser system can offer, so I found how perfect this Adobe Illustrator (AI) tutorial could achieve that. With the tutorial, I warmed up to AI and learned alot about what it can offer.

Afterwards, I went in and grayscaled the whole thing and changed the stroke colors to match how I want it engraved and cut.

 Now... here comes the frustrating part. When uploading my AI file into the laser system, the system does not recognize any colors other than my different shades of rastering. No engravings, no cut.

I went back home and tried to fix the file: made sure the strokes were at 0.001 inches, the colors were formatted or chosen correctly, named and organized the layers, and I got rid of the sun's swirl and my text. At this point I wanted a simple and clean picture, so I got rid of the swirl. The text was not being recognized correctly because I downloaded the font online, so I got rid of that too. Overall, it did not change a thing when I went back to the lab.

We had to transfer my illustrations into Rhino to get more control as to what has happened. Ronald, the technician, really helped me out here. He advised me on labeling and cleaning up the layers. Then he taught me how to fill in each layer through "hatching". Lo and behold the colors to engrave and cut now appear on the laser system. We still could not find out why the AI file did not work as well as Rhino did.

 I bought a 24" x 24" x 1/4" mixed (multi-purpose) wood at Home Depot for (around) $5. The landscape is engraved onto half of the wooden board. I chose a non-gradient wood, because the landscape will get a clean background (with no distractions) to be focused on. It turned out very well. However, the darker rastering did not show as much of a contrast as I would like.