This week’s assignment was to laser cut the Rice War Owl. When we started the process of trying to laser cut the owl, we still weren’t completely sure how it was formatted, so we did a run where all we did was shrink it and change the stroke size so they would cut. Clearly, it didn’t turn out well. It’s burned around the edges, though it didn’t cut through all the way, it cut places it didn’t need to, and there is little color variation. After this, we changed the vector cut setting to something a little less harsh and didn’t really have problems with it again.

In order to get the different colors to show up in the wood, we started messing around with color mapping settings. Instead of changing the colors of the owl to the colors in the menu already, which I had seen someone do previously, we found the RGB values of the colors and inputted them into the color map menu, which was easier for than sorting through the layers of the owls. It took us a while to remember the grids of rastering samples that were in the room, so we ran the same owl-colored squares with different settings for speed and power more times than were probably necessary, but eventually we settled 10 for power and 30, 25, and 5 for speed for yellow, grey, and blue respectively, and cut out an owl. It ended up looking really nice, but unfortunately I hadn’t found all of the strokes so the laser cutter mutilated the wing a little bit as it tried to trace the outlines of every color before we stopped it.

When we came back to keep working on our owls, we immediately tried to replicate what we had done the previous time, but after we had color mapping set up the exact same way, it was expected to take over an hour to cut. Instead of messing with those settings again to up the speed and lower the power, which didn’t even occur to us until later, we decided to try out just rastering the whole owl in one step again.  We tried this on two different color settings, and both owls we made had the same wing problem as the first, because I still hadn’t figured out that every color was outlined with a stroke that I hadn’t gotten rid of. Because there wasn’t quite enough color variation in these especially in the lighter one, we decided to create the owls in two steps, instead.

Our final process was to raster the grey and yellow in one step, with settings of 100 speed and 55 power, and raster the blue with 100 speed and 80 power and cut out the owl in the next step. To do this, we just hid the parts of the owl that we didn’t need using the layer menu, which is when I realized all of the colors were outlined with a .001 in stroke. We ran this for one owl to determine if we liked how it looked, so once we decided it was acceptable (though definitely not perfect – there could be more contrast) we ran it again, making three owls at the same time. For whatever reason, these last three ended up much lighter than the first, despite having identical settings, but we decided that we were pleased enough with them and called it there.

Because we had to redo things so many times, I feel like this lab helped me get very comfortable with using the laser cutter and messing with its settings. I wish it didn’t take so long to cut out these owls, because otherwise I probably would’ve kept making them until I was completely satisfied with my owls. But I guess these are good enough, and I know he next time I want to laser cut something, I’ll be able to get it exactly the way I want it.