We finally got to (in my opinion) one of the coolest topics in the class… the laser cutter!  We all got trained on how to use the laser cutter and for our assignment this week we had to cut out the Rice War Owl.   I already had a small amount of experience with the laser cutter from ENGI 120 last semester, but I definitely learned a lot more about Adobe Illustrator and Engrave Lab during this week.  Here is what Clark and I made after about 2 hours playing around with it:

We used four different cut lines in Engrave Lab to make this one.  Actually, only one line was a “cut” line, the rest were engraving lines.  The outline of the owl was the cut, and the three different colors of the owl were set to a different engrave line.  Each engrave line had the same speed setting, but their power settings each varied by 5.  This allowed us to make the wood look like it is showing different colors, even though it is really just different layers of the wood that you see.

Clark and I were really happy with the way this piece turned out, but we also wanted to try to cut an owl out of acrylic.  It turned out that the cut and engrave settings for the acrylic we used were almost the same as the settings for the wood we used.  This is what we made from the acrylic:

The first acrylic piece is just a 5.5″x3” portrait, and the second picture shows a couple key chains that Clark and I made to help learn about how we can manipulate files even once we import them into Engrave Lab.

This project was a ton of fun to do.  It was only slightly frustrating at the beginning because of some editing we had to do to the initial vector file.  When we first imported it from Illustrator into Engrave Lab, we saw that there were actually two owls that were part of the file.  One smaller owl was hiding behind the one we could see, and Clark came up with the idea to use the layers function in Illustrator to hide the larger owl (the one we wanted to cut) so that we could delete the smaller one.  It took a couple trials to find the ideal cut and engrave settings for our final product, and here is what we ended up using:

Working with the laser cutter is definitely one of the coolest things I’ve gotten to do at Rice (right up there with learning how to use the plasma cutter).  Can’t wait for future projects!