Halftone Art

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Kayvon
Posts: 552
Joined: Tue Oct 21, 2014 11:46 pm

Halftone Art

Post by Kayvon »

I played around with doing some halftone art, a departure from the typically utilitarian fare I dabble in. It was a fun experiment in different techniques and, after I settled on a method I liked, I was very satisfied with the outcome.
Halftone Dots
Halftone Dots
Successful Outcome
Successful Outcome
If you're interested in trying this yourself, or if you just want to see more pictures, I've posted a writeup at http://perryprojects.blogspot.com/2017/ ... e-art.html

Rando
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Location: Boise, ID
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Re: Halftone Art

Post by Rando »

Cool....thanks for the link, too!
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Lachette
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Joined: Tue Sep 03, 2019 9:15 am

Re: Halftone Art

Post by Lachette »

Going to be a long shot given the age of this post, but I got to try....

The makerspace that just opened up near me has a shark cnc and as I understand it, uses a post processor in vcarve to output compatible gcode.

I'm completely new at cnc and gcode (i dont even have exposure to 3d printers.. until now)

My problem, is they, so far, recommend importing the dxf into vcarve and letting it output the tap file. the dxf I have generated from halftoner is so large, vcarve crashes.

Halftoner can output gcode directly, but how would I get it so its compatible with the shark CNC?

I would also like to thank anyone for the help in advance for someone who is getting into this hobby.

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Kayvon
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Re: Halftone Art

Post by Kayvon »

Original poster here. I still check the forum regularly, so don't worry about the age of my posts. :)

I ran into similar problems importing DXF files in VCarve. Ideally, we would want to smooth out the vectors before trying to make a path, since the tiny, tiny variations won't matter at all on a physical medium. Those are far more precise than, say, the angle on my bit. Unfortunately, most tools don't have an option for this, so we need to make do with very large vector files.

The next step is to combine individual tiny, open vectors into big closed vectors (loops). I found that if I selected everything and tried the automated function in VCarve, the system would freeze for a while and then crash. To get around this, I only select so many groups at a time, run the function, then repeat. Eventually, I can select everything at once and run it, just to make sure I didn't skip anything. I had to do this for the successful image I posted, which consisted of several very long loops.

The last step is to create a tootlpath and output g-code. I rarely run into issues here, but a week ago I found a case where VCarve didn't want to create a toolpath with too many tiny vectors in it, so I created a series of toolpaths then combined them into a single g-code file. If you find the size of the g-code file to be too large, you could create several smaller ones and run them in sequence.

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