Introduction
This is an experimental approach to handling cutfiles, which would allow them to be submitted as kitbashes.
In the beginning
In late 2008, when I was running Ebbles Miniatures, I got my hands on a second-generation Graphtec Craft ROBO as a development aid. Initially, it was a very consumer-unfriendly machine in many respects, and it took a few months of experimentation before I found a way to make it easy for the end user to just print and cut a commercial model. After that, I started bundling ROBO Master GSD files with my new releases, and Denny brought me onboard during the TerrainLinX beta to integrate machine-cutting support into TLX products. After that, other companies started to do the same thing with their own products.
I mentioned that only to make one very specific point: at this time, ROBO Master was the only free and vendor-neutral controller software available, and I did not want the end user to have to purchase an aftermarket cutting software to make use of their machines. ROBO Master came in the box, supported all cutters based upon the Craft ROBO hardware (which covered the Silhouette-1, 2 generations of Wishblade, and 2 generations of Craft ROBO at this point), and that made it the ideal lowest common denominator.
However, it had one big problem--it was very rudimentary and simple. It had several flaws, amongst which was the fact that any embedded image data was stored as an uncompressed bitmap. What this means in plain English is that adding a 300dpi image to a ROBO Master document resulted in a 25MB file, and made the application unstable to boot. This, for reasons which I hope are obvious, made doing the printing and cutting from ROBO Master a nonstarter.
This is why I added registration marks to the PDF in the beginning--it was the only way to keep file sizes down and support machine cutting. I replaced my old 2px thick 7.5x10 check frame (used to check for scaling, skew, and positioning problems during troubleshooting) with 4 corner registration marks, and went to a full 8.5 x 11 frame size with the cutting area correctly positioned where ROBO Master would expect to find it. Okay, now you know why things were set up the way they were in the first place.
Silhouette Studio
Last year, Silhouette USA discontinued support for ROBO Master in an effort to encourage more users to use their Silhouette Studio application. We resisted the changeover because they didn't pay any attention to NOT invalidating existing content, and Studio was therefore pretty broken from our perspective at first. They have gradually improved it and crossed off a lot of our gripes, but it still didn't reach a level of acceptable usability until somewhere around Version 2. By the time Version 2.2 rolled around, it was importing and cutting my old GSDs without making me fantasize about casting the whole development team in a for-real snuff film sequel to the Final Destination series. At this point, I was no longer uncomfortable with the idea of officially supporting it as a cutting file format here. I mention this only to explain why I insisted we stick with GSD files for as long as we did.
The Silhouette Cameo
In 2011, Silhouette USA discontinued all older machines in favor of their new Cameo. One of the things it does differently is using a completely different registration mark format, and it doesn't play very nicely with the older registration mark setup. This meant that all of our existing PDFs with registration marks were either not usable or only marginally usable with the Cameo. Some folks suggested workarounds like coloring in one of the registration marks, but here's the thing: we don't like workarounds. We want stuff to work. You open file, you click button, the happymaking machine does its thing. We're not going to tell you to bust out a Sharpie and scribble over one of the marks because that just didn't seem like something we should be telling people to do.
Kitbash Complications
The fact we had to embed the registration marks in the PDFs is exactly what made allowing the sharing of cutfiles problematic in the first place. In many cases, older products were NOT formatted with machine cutting in mind, because they were released before machine cutting was even a thing, so not all of them were sized to fit within nor positioned optimally within the safe cutting area. This meant we couldn't just release the cutting path data as free files, as the graphical assets would have to be rearranged, resized, and registration marks added, which would amount to basically giving away the entire product for free.
At this time, we also did NOT have the shiny new storefront that we do today. Before Denny finally talked me into coding a new storefront for him, WWG was using a horrible, horrible open source shopping cart that forced him to make some unpleasant choices where kitbashes were concerned. Originally, he wanted them to be free to owners of the parent products, but it just wasn't possible to make the old cart work like that, so he had to make do with the sub-optimal solution of charging for the kitbashes regardless of ownership. So, the old kitbash policy was built around those limitations, and it just wasn't feasible to accept complete product conversions like a full set of cutfiles. If he had micropriced them, people would just buy the cutfile version and save money. If he charged full price, cutter owners who bought the originals would feel screwed. So, impasse, and we just didn't allow it for the sake of sanity.
Support complications
We also couldn't just go back and "add layers" or "stamp new marks on PDFs" or any of the solutions people normally come with. For starters, we have thousands of pages of content, and we don't want to have to do it all over again from scratch every time Silhouette USA decides to discontinue support for older machines or changes their regmark format. Instead, we would rather manage our assets in a machine-agnostic way and completely decouple hand cutting from machine cutting so there will be no interdependency between different file formats.
Where we are today
Bringing this historic tour to a close, I was aware of the problems the Cameo posed as soon as the complaints started appearing here last month. This brought our internal cutfile development to a halt while we considered our options. Three things happened in December to speed up the resolution timetable: Denny put on a sale earlier than I thought he would, I scrambled to release the next batch of Ebbles Labs sets in time for the sale so people wouldn't get sore if they were released after the sale, and a customer took me to task for not including registration marks in the stuff that predated my acquisition of a craft cutter. So, instead of working quietly on the issue in the back office and releasing a new set of guidelines later on in the month like we originally planned to, we're just going to do it early, and out in the open, right here.
The basic idea
Because we now have the ability to fairly distribute kitbashes (owners of the parent product get them free, non-owners pay the a la carte price), and Silhouette Studio does not suffer from the same problems with file size that ROBO Master files do, and Studio itself automatically prints the correct type of registration marks based on whatever machine you have plugged into your computer, we now have the practical (albeit theoretical) ability to support complete, self-contained print-and-cut files as kitbash submissions. To that end, I have spent the past few days kitbashing one of my recent Ebbles Labs releases, the Field Camp.
Here are the fruits of my labor: http://www.worldworksgames.com/store/in ... roduct=199
I'm planning to develop a full tutorial that makes it as simple as possible to create a valid cutfile kitbash submission. Before I do that, however, it needs testing. I would like anyone who already owns the Field Camp and a machine cutter to download their free kitbash and let me know how it works for them. The big difference between this and the old cutfile implementation is that the graphics are embedded in the cutfiles, so you will be doing your printing and cutting directly from Silhouette Studio.
In particular, I'm interested in whether or not it works with the Cameo. If I got it right, I can immediately move on to the tutorial, the new submission guidelines, and start working on my other sets.
You should be able to just go to the cutting settings pane and click "Send to Silhouette". From there, it should walk you through printing, loading, regmark scanning, and cutting. Do exactly that and nothing else--I want to see how it works for you out of the box, as it were.
Thanks in advance!
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