The Mini-Me introductory assignment is intended for you to practice properly setting up a laser cutter file. Completion of the exercise produces a tangible item that demonstrates to us your proficiency in using the laser cutters, specifically:

• Understanding the difference between vector and raster modes
• Understanding the difference between cutting vectors and etching vectors
• Assigning different settings to different line colors
• Setting power/speed/PPI values appropriately for your material (and its thickness)
• Focusing the laser

For this exercise, you’ll be creating a scaled-down version of yourself, a “Mini-Me”, using one of the laser cutters.

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Note that there are many other ways to produce a similar result with the same software - if you already know how to use Rhino well, do what makes the most sense to you, these are just guidelines on one method.

If on the other hand you’re having issues with Rhino basics, our crew can help assist you with this, but the assumption here is you have some Rhino fundamentals already.

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Set up your file

• Open Rhino

  • Rhino 8 is on all our laser cutter computers. You can start there, or if you want to prepare a file ahead of time on your own computer, feel free to do so.
  • Make a file in units of Inches
    • The current default if you open Rhino on our laser cutter computers is it will use a template file in units of inches, with the laser bed already drawn, and some layers set up. You’re welcome 😉
  • For all this 2D laser work, it will be most useful to use the Top viewport

• Set up layers

  • The most clear and convenient set of layers to have for this file is the following:

  <aside>

  • Vector Cut
  • Vector Etch
  • Raster
  • Laser Bed
  • Base image </aside>

  

  <aside> ℹ️

  Note the colors: Red for Vector Cut, Blue for Vector Etch, Black for Raster, Magenta for Laser Bed

  It is not absolutely necessary you use the same colors - if you made your cut layer green for example, that would work fine if you adjusted the laser cutter settings for green colors appropriately later.

  Our laser cutters only understand 8 index colors:

  Black, Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Magenta, Cyan, and Orange

  (RGB+CMYK+O)

  Whatever colors you choose, it is only important that the laser cutter has clear instructions what to do with them, in terms of vector vs. raster vs. skip, and power/speed/PPI settings.

  </aside>

• On your Laser Bed layer, draw a rectangle the size of the laser cutter bed if there isn’t already one there

  • For most of our lasers, this is 32”x18” in size, so you can make a rectangle from [0,0] to [32,18]
  • For Prospero laser, it’s 24”x12”
  • This rectangle is most useful for setting your print window scaling later

Import your photo

• Find a photo of yourself that you’d like to make your Mini-Me
  • Let’s say you’ve got some photos from your last beach vacation - great, we’ll grab one of those
• Import this photo into Rhino
  • Change your current layer to the Base Image layer, so that the photo lands there
  • There are many equivalent ways to do this: you can drag and drop the photo onto the Rhino Cplane (then select Picture option), you can run the Picture command in Rhino, etc.
  • For now you can make the scaling totally arbitrary - click to make a bottom left and top right corner so the picture is any random size, just keep it within the Laser Bed rectangle we made before:

Screen Recording 2024-09-08 221407.mp4

Scale your photo

• Next we want to start thinking about scale - how big our Mini-Me will be compared to the size of the real object (you):

$$ \fbox{ \textsf{ For this exercise, our scale is: }\\ 1/2" = 1' } $$