Laser Cutting Directly from Rhino to Epilog Fusion

Hi all, looking for some guidance on laser cutting directly from Rhino7 to an Epilog Fusion M2 laser cutter.

I prefer cutting from Illustrator and when I’ve attempted cutting from Rhino, I’ve found the driver interprets curves in a way where it stutters around turns. Even with basic shapes like a rounded corner rectangle, the laser sort of pulses around the corners, and when cutting complex designs this can add significant time to cutting. The work around is to send the job to the Epilog Job Manager, and then “quick print” with “optimize” selected–the laser then handles the curves smoothly.

After doing some (lots of) research, I’m seeing lasers don’t like NURBS curves and references to use the CONVERT command to create arcs/lines. Same result–stuttering. I’ve also tried exporting drawings as DXF flies, opening them back up in Rhino, joining all the segments, and same result.

Exporting drawings as Adobe Illustrator files and cutting from Illustrator works perfectly without doing CONVERT.

I’m baffled. Some users of our lab feel more comfortable navigating Rhino and are not familiar enough with Illustrator to prepare files for print, so figuring out this issue would be helpful.

I really hoped this would solve the issue, but it didn’t.

Including two videos. The first is cut directly from Rhino and shows the slowing down around curves and the second is the same drawing sent as an Adobe Illustrator file–so fast, so smooth. What is happening in the export to Illustrator that is converting the NURBS to smooth curves that can’t be done in Rhino with a command? Any help would be appreciated.

Have you seen this:
https://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/epilogrhino

Yeah, that’s a great resource for setting up to print (I really like the “table-lock” method) and impressive to see an order of operation list. However, no info on getting the laser to do smooth moves for cuts. There’s a host of similar threads going back to 2015 and no confirmation of a solution–surely someone is cutting from Rhino to an Epilog (or any laser) without this issue.

I worked for a company that produced laser cutters similar to the Epilog. Even though the utility that allows a different application to be used may be called a “print driver” or similar, its really only designed to work with specific applications. The laser doesn’t have universal support regardless of the application, like an actual printer.

Usually the hardware manufacturer will have a dedicated application designed to work with the hardware that may offer better results. However, that appears to be a “once upon a time” situation after checking Epilog’s website, they don’t offer their own application any longer it seems.

They do have an API, so if you need better results, you might be able to have someone write you some code that will do what you want.

“Even with basic shapes like a rounded corner rectangle, the laser sort of pulses around the corners, and when cutting complex designs this can add significant time to cutting.”

Your statement above makes me think the curves are converted to polylines rather than arcs.
Maybe they are converting curves from illustrator to arcs, since you indicate Illustrator offers better results.

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Interesting about the API–looks like an overly complicated solution to something that is more an annoyance than a real problem.

I just did some more tests, tried ConvertToBeziers, drew some arcs, circles, ellipses and they all showed stuttering. Anything other than straight lines stutter.

The only way to “fix” this without exporting and opening a file in another program (like Illustrator), is to send the print to the Epilog Job Manager and print from there (as follows).

During print setup, select Send to Manager

Open the job in the Job Manager and Quick Print while Vector Sorting Optimize is selected.

Printing this simple drawing directly from Rhino takes 46 seconds, printing from the Job Manager takes 20 seconds. I’ve seen larger, more complex jobs go from almost 2 hours of cut time (estimated) to just over 30 minutes when optimized.

I’ll share this info with Epilog and see if they have any thoughts.