Over the holidays I’ve had a bit more time to play around with Inkscape and try my hand at making stuff with Ponoko. And as a newbie with graphic software, there are still some issues that puzzle me. So I turned to our forum to ask this question:
“I have an image I’ve traced and coloured so I can get it rastered onto a piece of acrylic. But I’ve found that when I select the image and try to copy it into the P1 file in the starter kit all the details in the engraving change. The lines just seem to all get thicker and it wrecks the image. Any ideas on why the image is changing when I’m doing a simple cut and past within Inkscape?”
Right away I got a really good step-by-step explanation from Ponoko’s jimmy.kl. So I thought I’d share this on the blog because I know there are some people out there who are dealing with learning curves on Inkscape. Help can be found here on our site, especially on our Forums.
Here’s his reply:
“Hmm, not sure why Inkscape does this but it seems to be adding a black stroke around all the objects you paste into the template.
I fixed it by going to the Fill and Stroke palette, then in the Stroke Paint tab I clicked the cross to remove any stroke from the traced paths.
An example for anyone else following this thread…
In a new document I traced our logo with these settings:
which had this result:
but when I cut n pasted to the P1 template it looked like this:
So I opened up the Fill and Stroke palette, went to the Stroke Paint tab and clicked the cross to remove any stroke from the traced paths and that fixed it.
I will investigate further and see if there’s a way to update the template files so this does not happen. But in the meantime I hope this workaround helps you out Steven.”
If you want to add to the discussion thread, check here, under Making Stuff: Inkscape Issues.
**Remember we’re running a contest this month for file uploads, so if you create your designs and add them to MyPonoko, you might have a good chance to win $250 worth of fun designing and making with Ponoko.**
For everyone who wants a complete step-by-step guide to making your own personalized laser-cut jewellery, then check out this brilliant Instructable from Ponoko’s Dan Emery. If you use Inkscape you can download the .svg file that Dan uses in the Instructable here. Inkscape won’t open .eps files so if you want to customize Dan’s design you can use the .svg instead and convert your custom design into .eps once you’ve completed it.
Remember we’re running a contest this month for file uploads, so if you create your designs and add them to MyPonoko you might have a good chance to win $250 making on Ponoko to get them made real.
A few weeks back I wrote up my experience in using Inkscape with my kids to design a piece of jewellery with Ponoko. Now I can show you the results. They actually arrived pretty quickly but I’ve been messing around since then trying to work out what to use for the chain. We ended up going with the thin black leather, thought it gave the kind of “tough” look the boys wanted. Needless to say they were very happy with the results. They’ve already given some away to their friends and are quite keen for me to “make them some more Lego”. It’s definitely a case of “what have you done for me lately?” in my house.
I’ve added the .eps files to my new Ponoko showroom so if you want to get these made for you or your kids you can download them and have Ponoko cut them out for you. These aren’t for sale though. I’m not sure on what the copyright situation is with something like this. I think you’re pretty safe if you just make it for yourself and don’t try to sell them. At least it seems so according to the comments on this Instructable.
One word of warning. Inkscape doesn’t open .eps files. So if you’d like to customize the design yourself you’ll need the .svg file. And you can download that right here!
Here at Ponoko we know that there are SO many of you who are really excited about designing your own products. But there are some hurdles to get over, and the first that usually stumps people is actually getting your design into a form that can be made into something real. For those of you with design skills and experience using Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw it’s not such an issue. But for all you newbies the team here at Ponoko are studiously working on more How-To’s to help you expand your creativity.
One tool we are going to put a lot of focus on is Inkscape since it has some neat features for you new Designers that I know you’ll like. I know I do. The most obvious are:
B: It runs on Mac OSX and Windows. In fact I run it on both and it seems to be identical even.
and C: It’s FREE.
In my opinion, software is created to do something for me. Whether it’s sending an email or creating beautiful and unique jewellery NOT take hours of my time before I can even get a result from it. So normally when I get a new software package to use, I try to just do what I want rather than completely read the manual. While I’m sure that’s a bit frustrating for software developers who are probably shouting, “Read THE MANUAL Steven!!!” at their screens right now, I think a lot of people do this.
So if you are that way inclined and would like to get a quick win with Inkscape my very first suggestion is that you try tracing an image using the video at the bottom of this post. It is included in the Instructable that Dan and John created. Using the videos, the Making Guide in the Inkscape Starter Kit, and a lot of playing around my son and I were able to design our first piece of jewellery on Ponoko earlier this week. It took us quite a bit of time to get the image where we wanted it (mostly because of my lack of experience with Inkscape) and to then get it into the .eps version for Ponoko, but we did get there eventually. And it was very satisfying when we finally uploaded the completed .eps file to MyPonoko - a bit like having our first baby.
Here are some simple points that we came up with during the process that I think might make it easer for you to get the results you want without spending the same amount of time that I did. (Thank goodness for school holidays).
1. Choose a simple image! It can be tempting to want to trace something complicated but it can be depressing if it takes too long to get a first result. Especially if working with kids. Following the video below will really help. Please note the video pauses after about 10 seconds you just need to press play again to get it started. I find it’s easier just dragging the video slider to the point I’m working on so I can focus on that point in the process.
2. In the Ponoko starter kit it mentions that you MUST have your lines a certain color and stroke width so that the laser cutter knows to Cut, Raster or Engrave. But, I suggest you don’t do this UNTIL AFTER YOU’VE FINISHED YOUR DRAWING AND FITTED IT TO THE INKSCAPE STARTER KIT TEMPLATE. We started changing the lines as we worked but discovered after much drawing that the line widths we’re seemingly changing automatically. VERY FRUSTRATING! But when we left it to the end it was actually very easy to select and change the lines as a group. Knowing this would have saved us a lot of time. John and Dan created another video below that is very helpful with this and I suggest you watch that too.
3. Another reason NOT to change the lines for the Laser Cutter while you are working on your drawing is that they become so darn small that you need to use the magnifying tool to see them and then you can’t see the whole picture. You can avoid this by just drawing in a stroke width you like and changing them all at the end for the Laser.
4. When converting you lines to the right color and width for the Ponoko Laser you’ll need to set the RGBA values in the “Fill and Stroke” window. Within the Starter Kit it currently mentions only the RGB values. This only gets confusing if like me you start setting the A to 0 when thinking it’s the B. This causes your lines to disappear (and your kids to scream). You need to keep the A at 255 (as shown in the video above and image below).
With this much information you should be really dangerous now. Especially if creating customized jewellery, stencils, holiday decorations or any other 2d object is your first goal! Dan is putting together a new Instructable on a piece of jewellery he’s made and we’ll have that up for you to look at very soon.
