u/UnknownTurdy

This is a followup to to this thread where someone else was having an issue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/xToolOfficial/comments/1t6u63u/

I was having a similar issue, where I noticed just before finishing it would do a number of full passes over the metal and generally degrade the finish. Personally I thought it was going slower like the poster, but in fact maybe the fact it was a full pass made it comparably noisier / slower overall. I’m on a Mac (apple silicon) with the latest xTool Studio.

I had AI throw up a relatively simple but functional gcode layer viewer (the online ones didn’t seem to work as needed with the file) and exported the gcode via Settings -> Device Settings -> Export canvas as code. I’ve been trying a varied set of options to try to pinpoint the cause (beyond noise reduction) and so far I can see:

64+NR - The first 8 layers are skipped and then appended in reverse at the end (from 8->1)

128 Layers + NR = Same but 16 layers.

256 Layers + NR = Same but 32 layers.

It would appear that for every 8 layers, an initial one is skipped and moved to the end. I’ve tried to show it in the images, so I hope you can

To be totally honest:

1. Not sure if it is a bug, but assuming it is because the final layers would be out of focus if a z offset is used? If the first 50 layers are detailed and then untouched - it would potentially engrave 18 (@256 layers), move out of focus and at the end do another 32 over majority of the material with varying focal points.
2. Couldn’t really tell what noise reduction was otherwise doing, but it could be the path or other things behind the scenes.
3. I can’t really treat the gcode viewer as reliable, but it does kinda make sense what I was seeing in my embossings.

I tried my best to play around with other settings (including the source image) but couldn’t see anything else impacting. Ideally later I can run tests with specific shades to actually validate it happens but it really does match what I’ve been seeing. Hopefully the images give a gist of what I’m trying to say.

xTool Studio's tooltip describes it as:

“This function can optimize the rough effect of embossment processing for some materials.”

So anyone have a similar experience, or have any idea what the noise reduction does?

Sorry for the wall of text - its hard to put down all in my head and whats changed but I’ll try to be as concise as possible possible, there is a changelog on the menu bar but thats also bloated “/

As some of you might remember I posted a couple of weeks ago about a website I was working on, to help automate and simplify the colour discovery + application to layers. Just thought it would be a good idea to provide an update and encourage people to give it a try if they haven’t done so already.
Source code is public and available at: https://github.com/jonzkys/xtool-color-testing/
Public website at https://engraving.material

Theres a demo account if you’d rather explore, but since there is an option to seed your account with my data (which is the demo data as well) I suggest just seeding and then you have full control.

Since the last post there’s been some major changes both in design and functionality and a couple of major new features explained below - to be honest as this is created with AI its been a bit bloated with half baked features that need more consideration. But it’s just so simple to go from concept to a proof of concept page I’m always tempted to explore new possible routes to improve things. Couple of screenshots show pages + the new exposure method of creating tests from the graph.

Some words/phrases I typically use:

Palette: (per material, colours which have a mapping to specific parameters), either generated via tests + uploading the result or manual.

Sweep test: A sweep of either 1 or 2 varying parameters, such as speed 100->2000, similar to the test grid in xTool Studio.

Validation test: A test focused on specific parameters, looks like a sweep test but each cell has a specific set of parameters so typically wont produce a gradient across the cells.

So to start - I think the general sweep test is pretty much done. It generates the test strips fine and is ingested by uploading an image with the QR code. The purpose of the QR it is that the website to contains a reference to the test and the website will remember the parameters, and then when complete it can be uploaded and mapped back to the test. Then smarter things like overlayed results, automatic colour matching and analysis can be done via the website.

Validation tests:

Rather than relying on sweeping parameters, it’s possible to take an existing set of colours on a material and then generate an evenly distributed range of colours to be tested. This can be used to verify the existing saved colours actually work, or when changing materials you can check how your current colours would work on it. This is one of the stand out features, as its makes swapping materials so much easier - even if they don’t match 100% generating a test with 50-100 different colours from another material typically would generate a diverse palette for it.

Analysis pages:

Three separate analysis flows to try to provide better ways to refine your colours.

Experimental (Spectrum) - Test specific, lets you see how the colour changes against the params.

Testing->Stability - If you’ve uploaded multiple images of the same test, retesting the same test, or trying to validate a palette this is useful as you can compare the resulting colours. The subpage ‘validate’ is used to ingest new entries to the palette.

Materials -> Exposure - Trying to look at the relationship between the parameters and colours across all tests for a given material. It’s tricky to create visuals when so many variables play a part in the power, but I suggest locking it down with filters for specific searching. I.e If you’ve done a lot of tests at 125Hz or 10% power then use them as filters so the surrounding noise is reduced. From this page it is possible to create new tests from a resulting range of the scatter plot - So lets say I have a scatter filtered down and with a gradient of colours I like, I can select a region and the params to vary and it will generate a validation test with a random sample of points from inside that region. I think this is powerful but it’s very much a work in progress and I haven’t really tested it / verified it yet.

Key points:

Even though fixed-aspect resizing might be fine, I would always make any size adjustments for the tests on the website. The QR needs to be readable and the print engraving size is already on the edge of whats conveniently imageable.

Current limitations:

As it all hinges on the post engraving photo quality, if a dark/poor image is mapped to the test then the generated palette would be dim and not good. Originally I thought rotating the piece and taking multiple images and then averaging would help, but it’s still not good as there’s such big changes. I’m half tempted at the moment to get a ColourChecker to keep in image and have the app calibrate the image on that, but it doesn’t actually solve the reflection=better image type situation.

I can add support for other machines, but to be honest is quite geared towards the F2 Ultra and as I don’t have access to other machines I can’t verify if they’d end up working.

For people looking to give it a try - I have added an option to import all of my settings (the same ones in the demo). So in theory you could open it up, generate a validation test from my palette and get started in a couple of minutes. Can’t promise that my workspace / data is the cleanest or most accurate but it’s enough to get a good view of the site and to play around with it.

tldr

You can go to the site (or run it locally) - create an account (no email/name required), import the ‘seed data’ which is all the current data in my account and play around on the different pages.

If you wanted to try to the ‘exposure’ page which is the newer and most interesting thing, I suggest locking power / freq otherwise it’s quite noisy with all params.

If you wanted to try an engraving using my data, load the seed data

For actual engraving work I’d say svg-layers is the only reliable page, pixel-art is untested and i haven’t tried Loom for a while.

Any bugs, questions on how to use it and such - just drop them below or message me. You can always drop them on GitHub as well.

I’ve gotten into a new workflow which is working pretty well. Originally I was using ChatGPT to generate the skyline images as a png and then converting it to an SVG + simplifying. Though the conversion was pretty messy and it never worked out that well. Today I signed up for recraft.ai - not sure if others use it, but it can generate native svg files so seemed to be a perfect fit for what I was doing. I’ve included a screenshot showing the variations it generated.

Part of my processing was to simplify the svg to an amount that Xtool Studio could handle without crashing (~1000 shapes / ~15000 vertices), matching the colors to the best of my ability and then engraving.

Not really keen on ‘promoting’ the color matching logic as I’m still refining it and there’s a bugs, but it is now open source (https://github.com/jonzkys/xtool-color-testing) and I’ll be actively working on some changes over the weekend (which is probably another reason not to use it). One big issue which I ran into was my early keen-ness in trying to map hundreds of colors in single test runs which generally led to poor results. So I removed them all and started from scratch with at most 50 colors per test (didn’t cover a wide gamut, but enough for these). I also got a cheap lightbox from amazon to take more even pictures of the tests. Tomorrows a big day of testing to improve the colors - I have to start from scratch as there were some bugs in the test generation which made my previous results unreliable.

The sky was a bit of a failure (there's meant to be color + those are supposed to be colorful fireworks), but hopefully will nail it next time.

Genuinely impressed with the tiny detail it was able to put in the phone-booth and taxi! Dropped a pound next to it for some scale - overall the circle has a 5cm diameter and the engraving is 38x26mm. Made with a Xtool F2 Ultra.