Colour, preview and saving a scene

Seeing it before you cut it

Build Scene shows the stack every way round, and remembers which view you were last looking at.

• Stacked — the piece as it will look glued up, seen straight on. This is the one to judge the composition by.
• Exploded — the sheets separated and offset, so you can see which sheet carries what. This is the one to judge the depth by, and the quickest way to spot a sheet with almost nothing on it.
• Vector — one sheet at a time as pure outlines, which is what the cutter will follow.
• 3D — the stack turned over, each sheet as thick as your Sheet thickness, so you can see it from an angle. The space between the sheets is fixed; Sheet gap does not change it.
• Depth map — the picture the whole thing came from, beside the others for comparison. Worth a look whenever a sheet surprises you.

Layer Editor shows one sheet as it will be cut, black on light, with the sheet list and the checks on the right and the download below. Picking a sheet in the list, or a check that names a sheet, takes you there. It is for looking, not drawing: no view has a pen or an eraser. What it can take off a sheet is a stem or tab the build added — click its marker and rebuild, as Add bridges describes. To change anything else on a sheet, change the setting that made it and rebuild, or edit the downloaded SVG in your own design software.

Colour

Under Finish, Paint gives the stack colours. The presets are starting points rather than a fixed palette: under them is one swatch per sheet, back sheet first, labelled backdrop and nearest at the ends, and a click on any swatch takes any colour — one of the preset stops, the system picker, or a hex value typed in.

Colours are saved with the scene, so the stacked preview, the 3D view and the export previews all take them. They are saved half a second after your last click, to the scene you clicked them on — also when you open or start another scene straight away, or leave the studio. Nothing here touches a cutting file, nothing needs a rebuild, and nothing costs anything. It is for deciding what to paint or what card to buy.

Saving and reopening a scene

Scenes save themselves to your account as you work, and your account page lists every one of them under Your projects. The files below are for keeping a copy outside the studio, or sending one to support. They cannot move a scene to another account: a scene that belongs to another account is refused.

• Save scene.json — the scene’s settings, plan and the record of where its picture came from. Small, and readable.
• Download All (.zip) — the same manifest beside the depth map, every sheet and both previews. This is the one to keep.
• Open scene — takes either. While the scene it was saved from is still in your account, either file opens as a copy of it with its depth map: the one the file was saved with, taken from the scene — even if the scene has had another since, as long as that one is still among its previous depth maps. If the scene's sheets are still the build the file records, the copy has them too and opens ready — a setting changed on the scene since does not stop that; only a rebuild does. Otherwise press Build Scene, which is free for a picture already built. A line under the steps says what the copy came back with and, when something did not come across, why. For a scene that has been deleted, the ZIP brings it back with its depth map, ready to build in about a minute, and a bare scene.json brings back its settings and asks for a depth map, because that file does not carry the picture. A Stepped Layers project.json is refused with a pointer to its own tab, since the two studios save different files. A file whose scene belongs to another account is refused; the site owner, who can open one for support, gets a copy under their own account, and the customer's scene is not touched.

A file opens as a copy — the scene's name with "(copy)" after it — whenever the scene it was saved from is still in your account, so a file saved this morning never replaces this afternoon's work. Only a scene that is no longer there, because it was deleted, comes back under its own name. A scene that belongs to another account is refused. The cutting files inside somebody else's ZIP are still ordinary SVGs, and go into your laser software without the studio.

For what the exported files contain and how to get them onto the machine, see Exporting your files and On the cutter.

Moving around the canvas

Every view shares the same viewport controls: zoom in and out, a percentage readout of actual size at 96 dpi, and a fit-to-view button. The wheel zooms about the cursor and dragging pans. A millimetre scale bar and the canvas size sit in the corner, so you can judge how big a piece of detail really is rather than how big it looks.

Each view remembers its own zoom and pan, so flipping between stacked and vector does not throw away where you were looking. The 3D view is dragged to turn the stack over and wheel-zoomed, and it is the one place the material thickness setting is visible.

Downloading one sheet, or all of them

• Each row in the sheet list has a download icon for that one sheet, named as it will be on disk.
• combined, at the top of the sheet list, is every sheet as named groups in a single SVG, all on the same coordinates — one on top of another, as they stack. It is not a file to cut as it stands; pull the groups apart in your cutting program first, which is how to nest a whole scene on one board.
• Download All (.zip) is everything. It opens a progress window while the archive is built, because a detailed scene takes a moment, and offers a direct link if that fails.

Sheets are named {scene}_layer_03_of_07_subject.svg — the number, the total and the role — and inside each file every path sits in one group named the same way, so a cutting program lists the sheet as one object with a name you can read.

What is in the ZIP

• svg/ — one production file per sheet, plus the combined all-layers file.
• preview/ — the stacked and exploded renders, with your colours.
• depth.png — the picture it was all cut from.
• scene.json — every setting and the plan.
• README.txt — written for whoever opens the folder in six months. The finished size, the material and thickness, the frame and shape, an order of assembly with a row per sheet naming its role and polarity and file, a paragraph explaining what polarity means, the scene plan, and the result of the check with every finding and its suggested fix.