Hello Apple Valley High School FabLab students, it's Mr. Lee
and today what I want to do is show you how to set up a file for printing on our UV printer.
So the first thing I'm going to do is open up our template that I've created for making, um, a 4x3
printed acrylic piece and that's going to be in your Schoology folder for this project.
I've already downloaded it to my desktop, so I'm going to go "file", "open" and then look for
my UV printer 4x3 template and open that up.
And what you'll notice is that I set this so that the four inches is the width and the, uh, depth
is three inches. You can rotate this 90 degrees if you want to have it
in portrait mode; I have it in, or in landscape mode. So now what I'm going to do is go into, uh, chrome
and I search for anime characters because they tend to have lots of colors,
and this is a really good image that I, that I found. So I'm going to right-click on that image
and do "save image as" and I want to make sure it's a jpeg because using illustrator with
jpegs is a better way to do that. I'm going to just change the file name to "UVPrinterPicture"
so that I can find it faster.
One thing that happens too, is big
file names tend to mess up the machines; so now what I'm going to do is go into Adobe Illustrator
and I'm going to place that image, so I go to "file", "place", and there's my image.
I'm going to place that and it doesn't really matter where I place it because what I'm going
to do next, is I'm going to image trace that. There is a little bit of pixelation but, uh, that will go
away hopefully, and not distort it too much. So I'm going to do a high fidelity photo and it's just
warning me that might take a while; the bigger the image the longer it takes to, to capture it.
Once that's done I still have to expand it,
and then what I'm going to do is get it to fit in that 4x3, uh, box that was created.
And you notice that, that 4x3 template has a black line; the printer will probably want to
print that black line, so I'm going to take that black line away once I get things set.
And then anything that's white, we have to tell the machine to print white; we actually have white ink
that prints. So this has done, uh, it did pixelate, it did kind of change the image a little bit,
but it's going to be so small that we won't probably notice it. So I'm going to hit expand
and then I, I've already opened up my,
uh, template or my window for the transform, so I can change the size. But if you go to window
and then scroll down to transform, you might have to hit the down arrow to do that
on a smaller, um, screen size. So I'm going to select that still and isolate it,
because what I want to do is change the size of just this image.
And right now it looks like I want to go into my layers
so that I just select the image. So I'm going to turn off this for a minute, this is the rectangle
and then I'm going to select this and resize it. You see it's 35 by 17, so my width,
I've got to be a little bit less than four inches, so I'm going to go 3.9
and then I'm going to put it at 0, 0 for right now.
So if you look up here now it's at 0, 0, it's 1.95 inches in height and 3.9 inches long.
So now, I'm going to move this just a little bit, so I'm going to turn back on
my rectangle and then place this inside of it. I'm going to select that group,
move it inside, looks like that's going to fit pretty well;
now the other thing I want to do, I don't want my whole rectangle to be white, so I'm going to select
just this size and make a rectangle behind it that I'm going to change to white or to the specific, um,
thing that I need for printing white. So I'm going to go up to this rectangle tool and I'm going to
put in these dimensions: 3.9 and 1.95. So I'm going to select off that and I hit the rectangle tool,
and then I'm going to type in 3.9 for my width, and 1.95 for my height and create that. Right now
there's no border, so the stroke is zero but the fill is white. Well I need to have
a fill that is a particular swatch that we're going to add to make sure the printer prints
white, so I'm going to go to the "select" tool and then I'm going to go to swatches under window
and I'm going to open up that other library, so that's, here's my swatch window
and I'm going to go to Roland Versaworks. And when that opens up, when we did the print and cut, we had
this for doing the cut contour; the next one over tells the machine to print white. So I'm going to
bring the fill to the front and then I'm going to hit this; it turns it gray but it's really not gray,
it's actually telling the machine to print white. And so what I'm going to do now is move this so
that it's right behind and right over the colored image. Then what I can do is go into my layers
and in layers I can change and move this gray layer below
the colored layer. And now it'll print white first and then print all the colors on top of it, and
looks like I've centered it pretty well; I might select both of those groups and then just kind of
move it up a little bit in my, I'm using the arrow key to do that. and that actually looks pretty good.
So a couple more things that I have to do to get this ready to print on our UV printer, one
thing that I have to do is, if I leave this huge six by six inch workspace, the printer thinks
it's got to print all that. The other thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of this, uh,
black border because the printer will think it's got to print that too;
we just want to print the image. So I'm going to turn this off, I'm going to go into my layers
and turn off that rectangle, so I'm going to hide it. Then the next thing I'm going to do is go to
"object", "artboards", "fit to artwork balance", and so now the only thing that is there is the colored image,
and then I'm going to save that as a pdf file. So I have instead of Adobe Illustrator, I have
it selected to Adobe pdf; it'll add this tag on the end. So I'm going to hit "save",
and then "save" again, and now that is ready for printing on the UV printer. So, have a nice day.