To laser cut the Rice War Owl,  I started by downloading the prepared file from Canvas. After opening it in Adobe Illustrator, I used the Magic Wand Tool to select all the parts that were the same color as each other. I then changed that color to one of the standard RGB colors so that it would be easiest to match with the Color Mapping default colors.  I did this for all four colors, leaving the background gray. I then hid the layers that were colored until only the outline of the owl was left. I made sure this had a stroke size of 0.001 inches. Then I hid the outline and unhid the rest of the shapes in order to make sure their stroke size was above 0.003″. I then unhid everything and was left with this:

Really, Rice should consider changing the colors because I think it looks pretty cool like this.

The next step was going into the Epilog print menu and editing the color matching settings. I decided that it would look best to not etch the main part of the owl (the gray part). This left me with three other colors. To save time, I set all of the speed settings to the max, and only varied the power settings. I knew I wanted the green part to be darkest, then red, then blue, so I set the power highest for the green then lower for each of the other two.

After making sure that all the other settings were correct, I executed the job on the laser cutter. It went perfectly until it started engraving over the entire owl again. Turns out that if you do not specify color mapping settings for the gray color, the machine engraves it anyway. So after removing the fill from the gray area, the computer image looks like this:

And after round two at the laser cutter, I got an excellent result:

It took around 15 minutes to complete this 4 inch wide piece. When I asked why it was going so slow, despite the speed being at 100%, I was informed of another way to complete the process called hex code engraving. Instead of setting the colors to standard RGB colors, I instead set them to different shades of gray (just 3 shades, not 50). Using this template…

… I selected which shades would be best. Next I simply set the raster settings in the General Printing Preferences screen to the desired speed and power settings. I also set the DPI to 600 instead, and changed the cutting speed to 5 instead of the recommended 2. Additionally, since the machine pulls the smoke upward, I set the engraving direction to “Bottom Up” so that the smoke would not be pulled over the already engraved surfaces. This might or might not help improve surface quality. Further, another way of improving the finish would be to set the Image Dithering (strange word) to Jarvis instead of Standard. I figured that this might slow it down and not significantly help, so I decided to skip this step, leaving me with the following:

With a bit of tinkering, you could probably use either method, but personally I preferred the color matching. However, when you use the hex code method, the piece gets engraved in a single sweep from bottom to top, whereas with color mapping it takes multiple passes, which takes considerably longer.

After doing this project I now feel very comfortable using the laser cutter.