Just got this back from Aspex Labs...Interesting stuff, and good stuff too
George Thank you very much for gathering all this great information together! I very much appreciate Mel sharing his experience with us. Please see my response, in red below:
Hi Nick,
I don't personally have a way to produce .dxf files for conversion. So I asked one of the designers who has been (and still is) leading the way into producing models with premade cut files for sale to the public. He pretty much came up with the procedures and standards that this hobby is using right now
Subject: DXF files From Mel Ebbles
Here you go. DXFs for the M722, exported from Ultimate Papercraft 3D.
Some info to pass along: AutoCAD R13 format, ASCII, not binary. ROBO Master only has robust support for LINE entities, other entities either break on import or are poorly converted, so focus their import efforts on LINE entities. Gray lines are cut, red lines are valley folds, blue lines are mountain folds. These lines should be imported in color order (all gray lines, all blue lines, then all red lines, or whatever order), AND THEY SHOULD NOT BE COMBINED INTO POLYLINES. LEAVE MY LINES ALONE. (shouty capslock-impaired emphasis added for the Aspex
folks.)
Thanks for this. The DXF format is too big for us to hit all in one go and so we're keen to cover the basics to start with; focussing our efforts on getting lines entities importing properly is a good place. DXF presents us with problems, not least because the rendered design will often contain hundreds of short line segments. Silhouette Studio is designed around bezier and svg type format, and so in response to the difficulties we'll encounter with DXF, we've been trying to identify and develop intelligent mechanisms to convert to polyline where possible. However, I understand the reason why Mel is keen for us to leave the lines alone - there is a conflict of interests between providing an ideal platform for the designer, and being able to optimise code and simplify the operation for an average hobby user. Please may I ask if any of the following potential routes have any appeal:
1. Provide Silhouette Studio with option to either convert or not to convert lines to Polylines. (not converting will tend towards making the design cumbersome to load and save.
2. Develop a NEW feature which, although lines are converted to polylines where possible, forces the ROBO to overcut segments at corners by a scaled amount determined by the user.
3. Allow a line segment of a polyline to be scaled independently of the rest of the polygon. (ie, select, release, scale)
Reason for leaving the lines alone--Studio has a very nice scaling feature that scales lines along their axis rather than by a bounding box. If they turn my beautiful lines into a hash of polylines, I won't be able to selectively scale the lines so that their start/end points are wider apart or closer together. If you can make the lines longer, it simulates the human tendency to start and finish cuts outside of the lines, and that would stop 90% of corner tearing. (The other 10% happens inside concave areas where glue tabs meet, and I haven't found a way to make the stupid thing NOT follow the V. I'd love it if I could override the machine's tendency to decide what path it wants to follow--sometimes you want tight concave cuts to be done with 2 straight slices instead of a single V cut that damages the stock where the blade swivels. That was one of the showstoppers for offering precut models back in 2008--there were too many damaged corners and points caused by blade swivel.
Also, the machine is retarded. It doesn't follow cut paths in any way that makes sense if you leave it to its devices, so I want to be able to combine the lines MYSELF into clean closed paths--if I turn all of the gray lines in a single part into a closed polygonal entity, I want the machine to follow that path all the way around, not cut out random lines in a random sequence.
Same for score/perf lines--if I group a bunch of them together, the machine needs to perf them all as a single entity, not perf random lines all over the page at random times.
Basically, the ability to group and weld lines together into group constructs that actually mean something to the hardware. If they give you any guff, point out that I have 14+ years of experience with cutting plotters under my belt and 2 years of that are with Craft ROBOs, and that's why I think Craft ROBOs are retarded when they cut from ROBO Master.
We agree, Silhouette Studio is a fresh development, and as the code starts to mature, we're keen to keep finding ways to make the cutting sequence logical as Mel describes.
Hope that helps!
Yes
-Mel
I have asked for more .dxf files from other designers if you need them.
Yes please, much appreciated.
Other comments that have been made by the community (again on various sites) that I am enclosing for your info and consideration.
Why are undo steps being used for zoom levels?...zooming is easily done and undone with separate controls...it does not need to be part of undo.
I suppose it depends on what one is used to. Some people are used to working with packages with just a single undo, other packages undo in sudden jerks from the current view to the previous view.
In Silhouette Studio the needs of an undo redo system were established and planned into the software at a very early stage, as an important part of the user experience. The brief was to present an undo-redo that was easy on the eye, and easy to figure what was happening. To this end it was decided to include both system and design operations.
With regard to the Zoom undo, our reason for including it was a simple one. A zoom must have been done for a reason, and one reason might be to zoom in really close to a small part of a more complex design in order to edit that part. Our previous experience has been that a user might perform such an edit and then move on. But the undo would only be useful if the user could go back to see the operation that was being undone.
I understand the comment, especially from the point of view of just undoing ramdom zooms where one has simply been looking closely at pats of the design.
The user can nullify the effect of this to a certain extent by increasing the speed of the animation, and this is set in the display window inpreferences.
The issue with imported images being substantially larger than the size they are supposed to may be down to resolution "... So I went ahead and imported an image to work on; the Studio interface wants things to be 72dpi, that's why it balloons the images. My Vectorworks program does the same thing."
Comment from a customer. He suggests using just 72dpi images to get the outline trace from, and printing the higher (usually 300dpi9 resolution separately. However this will not allow you to get the registration marks incorporated into the image to be printed, so pre editing to incorporate them, then importing a lower resolution version of the part sheet would have to be done to make the cutline. Not an elegant solution. I would find it easier still to just adjust the size in Studio manually.
The writer is correct, and Silhouette Studio inadvertantly preferred 72dpi. However, this should have been corrected in V1.0.32 and later. For PNG and JPEG images, Silhouete Studio now interrogates the image to find any information at all about the original dpi and presnet as such on the screen. For other formats, or if the information is not found, Studio falls back on 72dpi as the default. If there are still problems please shout.
"I'm trying to find a feature request e-mail because there seem to be some fairly glaring UI omissions - middle click + drag doesn't pan, mouse wheel doesn't zoom, etc."
Thanks
By the way the current Silhouette Studio zooms with alt + mouse-wheel, and pans with 'hold down spacebar' + left-click + drag.
"... there doesn't appear to be a keyboard shortcut for save as (so used to being able to alt+f, a it's thrown me off) and the tab order for the registry margins is wrong (it jumps all over the list instead of going down through the options)"
Thanks again
Folks are following the changes with interest, and seem to be very happy with the way Studio is moving. I want to say thanks to all of you over there for taking our concerns and comments ..and actually listening and doing something with them...Thank You...not just from myself, but from our community as well...its good to know some companies still care about the customer
Cheers George.
We are keen to chip away at Silhouette Studio to provide a good experience and address problems that users encounter.
The feedback you have gathered for us here has been very useful to learn.
Thanks for your response to my plea for assistance.
Nick
Regards
George"