Inlays with positioning on a scanned inlay wood image

Lasers
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A product called Image Paint( Amazon Canvas | ImagePaint Laser Pro ), which is a plugin to Adobe Illustrator software and was pointed out to me and it looks pretty cool. But, not only does Adobe Illustrator not work on Linux, it’s also a subscription-only type of software. Its workflow is pretty nice.
ImagePaint Vincent Doan - YouTube

So I went looking for other options.

F-Engrave is pretty cool at V endmill engraving for inlays with CNCs:
https://www.scorchworks.com/Fengrave/fengrave.html

And Inkscape can be used with kerf inset/outset options to create a design and generate vectors of the design.

or using line stroke width as discussed here:

So now I’m wondering, should I hack at F-Engrave( open source and written in Python ) to tweak it so it first works with lasers and then either try adding images to the work space and try manipulating offsets and rotations of the tool paths or look for some of the existing apps which already do that via manual means and add inlay image insertions?

Or, does it make sense to do something as a plugin in Inkscape? Maybe the inlay images are layers and the parts are copied to the layers, moved and rotated and then gcode generated per layer…

It just seems like doing laser inlays using Linux should be easier or similar to the ImagePaint Pro product.

1 Like
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K40 Whisperer author Scorch, is also the author of F-Engrave. Ask him if it is possible to do what you want.

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I did and he said he wasn’t interested in the features( laser inlays and repositioning on material supply images ).

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Lots of people do inlays with Lightburn… what are you doing that isn’t supported in Lightburn…?

Haven’t tried to do any inlay work, so I’m probably missing something in the work flow.

:smiley_cat:

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LightBurn can do basic inlays just as Inkscape can but it’s when you have specific inlay material with colors, texture and grain which you want to implement in your layout where something like ImagePaint excells. Watch the video link I posted on ImagePaint and you’ll see quickly what I’m talking about.

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Haven’t had an hour to spare… but I skipped through it… Since I run Linux, it’s not usable on my machine :sob:

No direct item in Lightburn… I didn’t notice if it does Ruida code? I heard him say code, other than gcode, at one part, but don’t know what he means.

Have fun… look forward to your finished item photo…

:smiley_cat:

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ya, what makes it valuable isn’t that it uses Adobe Illustrator but the fact that it easily lets you select a section of your inlay design and then allocate it to a scanned in image of your inlay material then position it on that material so when you cut it on the laser, you get your inlay piece with the exact grain/etc you visualized with the plugin.

It can probably be done with a LightBurn camera piece at a time but you won’t get to see your design first and fully fleshed out. I will have to play with Inkscape to see how far we can get using layers and scanned images of the inlay material.