HOW TO MAKE A LASER CUT MAP
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- Опубліковано 20 лип 2024
- If you want to know how to make a laser-cut map, then this is the video for you. The map-making process isn't as difficult as you think and in this video, I will show you the easiest way to use your laser to cut a map for any place on the planet.
I will walk you through simple map styling to get the best laser cut and show how with a tool like Inkscape you can create easy multi-layer visuals that will be the envy of all. So come and join me and we can make our world together.
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►►►► VIDEO CONTENTS
0:00 Introduction
0:32 Creating Map Images
4:45 Converting Images to Vectors
8:21 Laser Engraving and Cutting
8:48 Assembly
9:29 Final Thoughts and Additional Tips
FTC Legal Disclaimer - Some links found in the description box of my videos may be affiliate links, meaning I will make a commission on sales you make through my link. This is at no extra cost to you to use my links/codes, it's just one more way to support me and my channel
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Steve this by far is the easiest and best explained tutorial on laser cut maps. You are right, most videos go through a uneneccsary complex path of managing the map downloads. You have made understanding so very simple. Thank you
You're very welcome! I like things simple for myself too 😉
Thanx for this, I'd watched a couple others and was left scratchin my head. You do a good job of telling the listener "why" we do each step and simplify the process, good job
Glad it was helpful! I try to explain the rationale for things. Sometimes it works, and sometimes I miss the mark a bit, but if there's ever something you don't understand, ask.
Thank you for being realistic. Some other YTers have made this very complicated. I am now looking forward to doing this with my local area. Great content!
Glad it was helpful!
Two days ago someone asked me to make a clock with Brasov map (Romania) and today I found this video. Thanks!
Hopefully this is helpful
This is THE BEST video on this technique! Straightforward, simple, and perfectly easy to understand and follow. Thanks Steve!!!
Thanks Sam. It means a lot coming from you!😁
Great idea and very well taught. Thanks Steve!
Glad it helped. Thanks!
Thanks for taking your time to put this vid together it showed me a lot! thanks again and I subscribed.
Thanks. Maybe I should say it more often - videos are actually a lot of work. But it’s something I enjoy…especially if they help people.
Excellent Video - Thanks for posting !!!
Thanks! I have another video showing how to CNC topographic relief maps coming out tomorrow - though it went online for channel members yesterday. 😉
Nicely done and well explained. Thank You.
Thanks!
This was a great tutorial; thank you. Have you considered making one that is a 3D topo map for your CNC? That would be very interesting, too.
Hmm. Indeed. I'll have to add that to my list.
Literally just been thinking on how to make these!
Hope it is helpful
Thank you so much for this tutorial; it’s the most straightforward and concise explanation I have seen and I have watched several. You have a gift for teaching and incredible fluency in software. That’s the part that boggles my mind. I want to do a few maps; I’m thinking of using blue opaque acrylic for the water or, maybe translucent blue and backlight it..ooh la laaa! I truly appreciate the time you spend educating us Steve. You’re awesome!
You're very welcome! My only goal is to help people grow 😁
@@SteveMakesEverything I don’t know how this will come across but my husband and I refer to you in our conversations about our makes and our machine lust (looking at the latest iteration of the Genmitsu with the linear rails-looks like they took your feedback to heart) as though you’re a long time friend. Is it weird that you’re a household name in Northern Virginia?😁
@@CutItOutWithUsLOL, I'm hardly a household name in my own house.
Northern Virginia is a nice part of the world.
@@SteveMakesEverything LOL! Well, when I say “Steve said _________” my husband knows exactly who I’m talking about and is actively listening which is not a common skill/behavior! 🤣
I’ve been fantasizing about rushing the Canadian border since 2016 so I’d be happy to trade places! But you’re right, NOVA isn’t bad. Crowded, but it has its merits!
really great video, thank you
Thanks 😊
Very cool!
Thanks and welcome to the channel!
Good video a lot more to the point then the ones I origanally learned on. A trick I found to cut down the laser time, depending how thick you want you want your roads. If you are ok with thin roads or haveing the roads outlined with double lines this may work for you. Instead of engrave the roads set that layer to score or cut with a weak setting like cutting thin cardboard. This may require thining the lines in you editing software. For some maps It gives a nice clean look and is much faster. Other applications I still engrave the roads but just an option.
Yes there are many options. It’s fairly complex tooling, but the results are great
A nice way to speed up (eliminate actually) the engraving process... you can trace the center line of all the little streets and then do a low power "cut" with a defocused laser. That way you can engrave all the small roads pretty fast. I did a SF roads and took about 10 minutes to do all of them. Now, I use CorelDraw that has a feature called centerline tracing. It take a thick raster line and makes a vector line smack in the center of it which you can use for the defocused cut. Works gr8. Cheerio!
Excellent tip and would definitely improve the time it takes
Freakishly awesome, subbed and liked. I just made my bros Christmas present using your tutorial-. It's a map of where he lives now, I still have a bit of work to do on it but you gave me everything i needed software wise. Thank you so much for your help, it is greatly appreciated. I hope you have a wonderful Holiday! I'm so excited to see how he and the rest of my family react to seeing it, if I can get it how I imagine it'll knock them out (in a good way!)
Awesome! Thank you!
@@SteveMakesEverything Got it made and gave it to him- he and his family loves it! it's about 16x16 inches- my first finished project. It's rare that I'm impressed with my own work but I had trouble giving it to him since it turned out so good :D
@@sannyassi73 Being hard on yourself is what drives you to grow and improve. But don't forget to applaud yourself for little victories.
I'm happy this worked out so well for you. 🙂
Thank you for this video! I've followed you method and my (diode) laser cutter is now halfway through a map of my city. Taking a bit longer than with a CO2 laser, but that's okay 😉
Cheers from the Netherlands!
Nice! Yes, a trade-off you make with a diode laser is time, but in return you get very nice engraving quality.
@@SteveMakesEverything Yep! This first one is going to takes ages, but that's fine. I'm still tweaking the power and speed settings for the wood I have, and I figure I can go at least twice as fast whilst maintaining quality.
Things like this do make me look hungrily at a CO2 laser, though ☺
@@SolarWebsite Maybe you need a CO2 AND a diode laser😉
Great vid... Thanks
Glad you enjoyed it
Steve, Real novice here...would be great if you could update with a video showing a bit more of the step-by-step process. Trying to follow along but got lost. I like your process, seams more basic with options later on to make more detailed. I'm trying to do a lake in Montana where my family has a cabin. Pretty basic with lake and county road around it. Thanks for anything you can help with.
If you have specific questions just shoot me an email
Nice video - thanks
Glad you enjoyed it
Just got my laser and while doing research I really liked this idea. What wood do you find works best? Also have you tried using something else for the water? I was thinking viny, less messy.
Basswood or Baltic birch plywood works well. If you want to do something different for the water you could try blue acrylic (and green for the land if you wantedj
So excited to give this a try today. Quick question, when you save your images with the zoom factors and image size, is it saving all the small roads and things you don't see on the screen until you zoom in? Or do you zoom in and save several images and stitch them together in Inkscape. The reason I ask is we live on an island and we only have one main road from top to bottom and the rest are small roads you have to zoom in very close to see on the screen and those are the ones I'm most interested in having. Many thanks and I enjoyed how simple and straight forward your tutorial is.
Yes these are vector images so all of the detail is preserved
Cool to see Halifax in the thumbnail!
It’s in my ‘hood 😀
Great job! Well done!! What is the option to check to see the homes and buildings please? THANKS
Hmm, short answer is that I don’t know. I’m not sure that information percolates down for Google maps.
Thanks Steve this is so great. Do you know how to do bathymetric data too??
Ha, I can barely handle streets 😁. The data is out there though a laser cut map may not be the best for this. I would do this with a CNC because the resolution is a lot better. I did a video to create a topographic map map which would be similar.
Thank you for posting this video!! I was wondering how you cut out the pieces of the top layer so the water on the bottom shows thru. Is it strictly done on the laser printer?
Yes, only laser cutting
Trying to watch and read the CC as I can't hear so good anymore. Was there mention of kerf as it relates to interlocking pieces? Would love a detailed breakdown on that!
Well there really shouldn’t be interlocking pieces since all the land is cut from a single piece. Kerf should be an issue
Great process Steve. The image trace of Lightburn can do the same as Inkspace?
Yes Lightburn can do this too
Thank you for this. I can't wait to get my first laser. So many options though. Tempted with OMtech for the money but like MIRA's as well at almost double the price? Is it worth it? Subscribed
Mira lasers are probably worth the extra money, but not if it means you have to live in the lower cabinet. They use better parts than a base OMTech laser and will offer a lot more power. You could also check Gweike lasers. They are a good balance on price, though they may tend to lock you in a bit like the Glowforge
I am so new to this, skipping the part of building a frame killed me lol
Now trying to learn how to do that....
The only challenge in assembling the frame is ensuring accurate cuts. The rest is mostly screwing lots of corner brackets into extrusion
Hi Steve, great tutorial. I see you only cut three images from the four, is there a reason for this. Many thanks.
Only three layers on this map.
Hii, thanks for ur time. I would like to know how many minutes take cutting and engraving ?
This would depend very much on the size of the map and the level of detail you want. This particular map took about 30 minutes for the main engraving on a 45W Muse 3D. My 90W laser could do this in about half that time.
Thank you so much for this video. I have a question for you. Can I use lightburn instead of Inkscape ? I feel more comfortable using lightburn when it comes to tracing images. Thanks in advance ❤
Yes you can! Once you have the map you can go directly to Lightburn though you’ll have multiple files or layers to handle the map layers
Could you please explain on how did you create a frame layer adjoining the "Halifax" and all the other layers?
Let me see if I can put a Short together, but if you using Inkscape you can use the path merge tool to integrate multiple elements into 1.
Steve, love your videos, but my map is way to big of an area....how do I crop the section I want to burn?? Thanks again for all your videos
You should be able to zoom in with the mapping tool before you capture the image
When you're used to 3D printing 2 hours is nothing! Haha
I have several 3D printers in my shop too, so I know what you're saying😀
vere beautiful i love it .
Thank you! 😊. Make one of your own too! I might make one out of three or four layers of acrylic some time.
sir i am from india where from you.
sir your explanation is so clear and very easy i pick delhi map but i have not leser cutting masin becous i am a studant but in future i make delhi map i like to learn new skills. thnxx for your explanation
@@_kaif_siddiqui_ Happy to help
@@_kaif_siddiqui_ I'm Canadian, though I have visited your beautiful country several times (Pune and Bangalore) and have many friends there.
So the only thing I have trouble with is image tracing the map I got so I can make it a vector. The problem is the highways. They end up looking like little eggs at the exits when the roads circle on each other. If that makes any sense.
If you use Inkscape you should able to convert the bitmap to an SVG. You might be trying to resolve too much detail so eliminate the street level. In a city like New York, resolving down to the minor street level would probably be impossible
Hey, awesome tutorial. Can you help me with one thing though? I do everything right but when i download my image it says "keyboard shortcuts, map data" etc etc.. on the bottom of the image whilst you don't seem to have that issue. Any idea as to how i could get rid of that?
Hmm. I haven’t seen that but you load the images into a drawing program like Inkscape and crop them a bit
great video Steve, I am newbie here, I have one question as I am trying to figure out how to cut out the waters. 1st land image (red lines) is what I need to set laser power high enough to cut through right? any modification needed on that image? Thanks
You can take this to whatever extreme you want. I kept it simple in the video with just a solid background painted blue and then all of the land with roads engraved on a single layer glued on top of it. You could just as easily do the land in green, then the local roads in black and finally the main highways in red, which would create a 4 layer map.
If you wanted to have separate pieces for the water you can start with the main map where land was black and water was white and just invert it to cut the water pieces, then invert it back to cut the land and finally put it all together like a jigsaw puzzle (though on a like this one with lot of lakes, ponds and rivers, it would be a fun assembly.
@@SteveMakesEverything I meant to ask you how to make those cut outs to show blue panel on bottom. Thanks
@@kunjooyou569 Well I cheated. They aren't cutouts :-). I started with a flat sheet that is the dimensions of my map and painted it blue. Then added the land pieces on top of it. If you leave a border around your map, then all the land will be attached to a single piece of wood that you can just lay over top of your water layer.
@@SteveMakesEverything ...I watched the whole process...I am just talking about your layover "land piece" on 8:51 mark, your land piece has cut outs (holes? ) the see through blue waters. Thanks
@@kunjooyou569 If you are asking how the small lakes and ponds are cutout, there is nothing special to do. You are really cutting out the land and anywhere there is water, the map will have a cut line around it, so you'll get a hole
great tutorial, but Hi, I'm a big fan of your way of making maps. I have a small challenge in inkscape. I can't get maps to stick to the frame. can you give me a hint. TU
Not sure I understand. Shoot me an email (see description) and ideally attach a photo of your problem so I can better understand the issue.
I just downloaded inkscape tonight. I followed your video but how do you do the union for the bridge? I tried it a few times and it didn't work.
Apparently, I made assumptions about Inkscape knowledge that crossed a line. So here's what I did for bridges:
- Select the land layer of the map, then draw a rectangle where the bridge would be on the map (i.e. Under the road that spans the water). This rectangle should overlap the land on both sides
- Then select the rectangle and the land on both sides, so all 3 are highlighted.
- Finally, choose the Path->Union option to union the 3 vectors into a single vector
Let me know if this resolves the issue for you
Hello Steve, Thanks for the video. I am trying t make a map but Snazzy Maps only allow me 10 downloads per day. Do you know if they have a subscription that will allow more? I looked but did not find anything. Thanks.
I don’t know if they have a paid plan. I think they just restrict daily usage.
Your land layer had open shapes on the border that somehow go closed when it was brought into Lightburn. How do you close them? I have tried numerouse times, but it never comes in l,ooking like yours.
You will notice that I drew a border around the land. In Inkscape I merged this shape with the land image and it closed all of the shapes
when I do that my whole map is kinda red so it would cut nearly everything out, I don't know how I can create a map, the cut lines are everywhere and it would make a mess if I would run it like that with my laser. can you maybe make an update video maybe with a little bit more difficult area and show us all the steps in detail? That would really be awesome :)
I’m actually working on a new video with an improved tool, so stay tuned. But if you are seeing lots of cuts, then you must be using too much power or not enough speed to do an engrave.
@@SteveMakesEverything that would be awesome ☺️ no i meant in the file, i havent lasered it because i would need to edit alot to make it work. At your file you only have a few red lines that it cuts and in my file they are everywhere all over the roads so it would cut out all the roads and everything 🙈
I have my map in Inkscape. I need to cut out a rectangle area of the map and resize it for what I what. Does anyone know how I can do this?? Then I want to do the same thing with the roads and size then up
Look at image clipping. Basically draw a rectangle the size you want and lay it over the thing you want to crop then select both object. Then use the Object->Clip-> Set menu option. (Note: I'm doing this form memory, so you may have to play around a bit).
Hi Steve,
Newbie to lasers. The part I don't understand is how the roads are a solid fill. I know what a solid fill is and have Lightburn now. The SVG file with roads / street has 2 lines (an outside and inside representing the width of the line). How can I make them solid without filling in more then I want. (like road numbers)? I tried picking a few roads and doing a fill and it but this would also mean hours of laser time doing these little fills. Or maybe there are no fills and when 2 lines are done it looks like one line. Thanks in advance. Randy
The problem with not filling roads is that you will end up with many very narrowly spaced lines and it will be very hard to make sense of the map. Of course this would depend on the map scale, but this would be true for most city maps.
In lightburn there is a setting for "fill" and "fill+line" (though I think they've removed the latter in the latest lightburn). At any rate if you just fill roads rather than drawing the road outlines and then filling, it will go a lot faster. Another way to improve speed would be to convert the street layer to an image and engrave that onto your land outline. However this may not provide the best quality unless you are engraving the image at 300dpi (which would also be slow)
Sometimes awesomeness just takes time😉
@@SteveMakesEverything Thanks Steve for the quick reply. I figured it out in Lightburn. I just now need to figure it out in vCarve. I will carve in wood the lake bathymetric layers so want to use the same software for lasering the roads on top so all together and perfectly aligned. I got the Onefinity J Tech 24W QUAD PRO Laser for this same reason. Thanks again
Can you tell us what you use to finish the map? ...poly, paint, etc..?
In this particular map built for the video I didn't apply anything to it, but for a production map destined for a customer's wall I would apply a couple light coats of flat clearcoat. If you wanted to do something different, you could also paint the "land" material green before you cut and engrave, though you would need to mask the painted surface before doing this or clean-up would be a challenge
I'm trying to set up a multi layer cut like this and I want the laser to pause between layers so I can swap out the wood. Is that possible?
Depends on your laser but it it is by far easier just to handle it as two separate images and cut them separately. I typically handle this like multiple layers in a drawing program and export each layer spearately.
Nice video... and looks pretty close to what I'm looking for.. I do have a couple of questions about street level maps vs zoom level - I sent you an e-mail.
Saw your message, but I'm not sure I can help much because you're fighting Google Maps to some degree
Thanks for sharing, learned a lot. Question, when glueing the bottom layer with paint on it to and unpainted layer back, how did you get the paint to stick with white PVA glue? Did you have any issues getting it to stick? Thank you.
I use either PVA or regular yellow carpenters glue and either sticks very well. The blue paint is only a single layer so it isn’t thick enough to fill in all the pores in the wood
I followed this step by step, great tutorial btw! But for the life of me I cannot get the roads to trace nice and crisp. They don't come out as nice straight lines, more with rounded corners, etc. The files are just not clean enough I guess?
If you are seeing something like this then maybe you’ll need to do some alignment work and cleaning on your laser. Also verify that the focus is correct. Finally try reducing the power and/or increasing the speed a bit because maybe your just hitting the material a bit too hard. Create a small map a couple inches square and work with that until you get things sorted out
@@SteveMakesEverything Well I meant when tracing the bitmap, the trace does not come out very clean. The roads are not crisp lines but curves in the corners
Do you know how to add the city or town boundries using Snazzy Maps?
Not specifically. You may not be able to do that unless it’s on some layer of data in google maps.
@@SteveMakesEverything Thanks. I think I am just going to have to make an outline and hope I can line it up correctly in Inkscape.
That’s probably the best way. Put it on a separate layer so you can move/reshape it to get it right independently of the rest of the map
i was following along and snazzy maps is not the same as in the demo you use. no default settings or way to take out roads and stuff.
Possibly they changed their service since I did the video. I’ll have to take a look
What material is the blue layer?
All layers are 1/8" baltic birch. For the bottom layer I just cut it to size and then sprayed with with blue Krylon pain before gluing the land layer on top of it.
Hi Steve, do you use Inkscape to control your lasers?
I don’t. Most lasers can be controlled with Lightburn or LaserGRBL
Would this be as easy in lightburn?
Yes, pretty much the same process, though you get quite a bit more control with Lightburn so you might be able to do even more.
@@SteveMakesEverything nice. Thanks for the reply. You've already helped me more then you know. Keep up the great videos. I'm a noob at lasering (3 weeks) and you're really good.
@@kydenj28 We were all beginners at some point 😀
Hello, after geometry off and labels off I still have plenty of stuff impossible to remove. Bug?
usually I start by turning everything off and then start turning on the layers that I want.
@@SteveMakesEverything Thanks for the answer. The thing is when I go to ALL and turn geometry off and labels off there are still plenty of things on (water, texts...). Basically ALL is far from being all. ;)
Now it's working without doing anything different... Go figure.
@@rosebuddesign635 Well there could be bugs. I've run into a few oddities with this tool
@@rosebuddesign635 When in doubt, close the tab and reopen the page
Okay so I am wanting to do layered. Where the water is cut, and THEN the roads are cut out and glued on top of that. I am so stuck lol
Fear not. In the map here I cheated a bit. The water is really just the backing board painted blue and then I cut the land out as a single layer with roads. Anywhere a hole is cut through, the blue shows through (e.g. lakes and rivers).
@@SteveMakesEverything yes and I’ve gotten that part- but I can’t get the roads and highways to cut out so I can layer those on top (not engrave). They just crumble. Too small I guess. But I can’t figure out how to widen them without ruining the entire map LOL. Newbie trying to do expert things here
@@alyssacarr4447 Ah, you want to create third layer with the roads then. Trying to cut them out would be extremely difficult - even impossible. If this is what you want to do, I'd recommend engraving them on a layer of clear acrylic and overlaying it on your land layer. If you were to reverse the engrave and do it on the back of the acrylic then you would get what looks like a glass front on your map and you could just put it into a frame.
I had you until you skipped ahead. Do you have a step by step tutorial on how to do the bridges and stuff?
I didn’t really skip ahead because there’s not much to this. I did have to modify the design to add a rectangle for the bridges, but any drawing program can handle that.
I noticed that the map of halifax has two bridges, it is Halifax, Nova Scotia?
Indeed. Is there another Halifax?
@@SteveMakesEverything supposedly there's like 8 in the US.
Did this mean your from Nova Scotia?
@@mrd2424 I'm originally from the Ottawa area in Ontario, but now live on the east coast - just seemed like a good place to be when I retire.
@@SteveMakesEverything I live just outside the HRM myself, and came upon your channel while researching laser cutting machines
@@SteveMakesEverything Would you mind terribly if I sent you an email with some questions in regards to the whole process of ordering from FSL?
am I stupid or is the map from snazzy not downloadable?
Well I doubt that your are stupid 😁. But clearly they are since I used them here. Of course I can’t recall what I did in this case. I do remember loading bitmap map images into Inkscape and converting them to vectors though.
easy to understand, but the G*D-d@mned thing keeps reverting to NYC - not what I want!
Well I’m not responsible for that 😁
You lost me at 6:15 when you deleted what you were doing but never explained how you had the red outline 1 min later where you imported both images, land and streets...was following along but now stuck.
Sorry it was just a quick look at what I did to create one of these layers. There is a bunch of boring pixel pushing in between that wasn’t really useful to the video
I've heard good feedback about the woodglut instructions.
woodglut instructions?
Really poor thought-out narration. You're all over the place with the mouse and fail to clearly articulate what you are clicking on. Had to watch this many, many time trying to follow along.
Always a tedious balance being free-form vs reading off a teleprompter, but I'll try to be aware of this in the future.
This isn't helpful at ALL for someone not knowing anything. Maybe add in title "With some Inkspace Experience" thumbs down.
I cater to lots of groups ranging from total beginners to advanced users. This project is realistically more of an advanced project where you will need more than just basic laser skills and will need some design experience.
As you get going in this hobby, you are going to want to pick up a drawing program to design some of your own work and I would recommend Inkscape because it’s pretty straightforward and free to use. Once you do that that, then come back a rewatch this video and it will make a lot more sense.