Tayda UV Printing

How does one go about printing an image on an enclosure. I understand that the image needs to be traced in illustrator, but when I do this it turns into hundreds of colors and paths. Do I need to reduce it to fewer colors or can the Tayda printer handle this high of fidelity?
 
Just got 3 new enclosures in. I still have more to learn. All were created in Inkscape and Affinity Designer but I had to get the layers and spot colors correct in Illustrator. I will try again.

I really do like the gloss and emboss effects. Gloss-V on Julia and Emboss on VfE BumbleBee.

View attachment 9968View attachment 9969
like this bee printed here except I am printing a peach head graphic - not including the background and text. see attached. I have the ai files for that original art so I assume I can just drop it in and trace?
 

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like this bee printed here except I am printing a peach head graphic - not including the background and text. see attached. I have the ai files for that original art so I assume I can just drop it in and trace?
Yes, I’ve done it with complicated graphics that generated a LOT of paths after tracing and it came out great.

Edit: [example 1] [example 2]
 
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Awesome! Love the way those turned out. Which trace preset did you use etc? Anything I need to look out for?
For complicated images, I'd most likely use the High Fidelity Photo and get good results. You can always go tweak the preset in the dedicated windows (or if you want a simpler/different trace).
As the source material may give different results, I treat it more in a case-by-case manner.
I always check the trace afterwards, and sometimes do clean-up, but remember, the small details you see at 4800X won't likely show-up on the print.
 
Thanks a lot to this thread. Here is my UV printing result. BTW, tayda shipped my order only one day after I placed my order.
View attachment 14472
The left one is using matte black, image is little bit off center (Shall I complain with tadya?). The right one is matte black sand, it is perfect. I think I will probably increase the font size or use bold font next time.
Looking good, reminds me of the line work on the Adventure Audio stuff.
Most of my stuff has been centered, but you have to account for some tolerance. For really "precise" stuff (like your design, or pot markers) I think it’s preferable to drill it yourself. Always depends what you’re confortable with.
You can always confirm with Tayda to see if they have any additional hindsight to have a perfectly centered print.
 
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I only ever ordered one Tayda print job on a pre-drilled enclosure. I had tick marks all around the knobs, so the fact that they were just a little bit off was very noticeable to me. Since then, I've just been leaving markings for the center punch at every location. I'm really liking the cleanliness of the enclosure that I run through the drill press.
 
If mine was off a wee bit like that I'd manually drill the holes into with a stepbit into alignment. The washers should cover the difference. Looksl ike the middle ones are only out in the picture. Would have to probably use a bezel for bigger LED size. Design looks great!
 
When you guys are doing your gloss/matte finishes, are you applying them to the entire face of the enclosure or are you only applying them to any graphics/text you've added to the layout?
 
When you guys are doing your gloss/matte finishes, are you applying them to the entire face of the enclosure or are you only applying them to any graphics/text you've added to the layout?
You could do it either way; it depends on the look you're going for. For my pedals so far, I've gone with just doing the gloss varnish on the graphics since I've been doing black on black pedals and want the graphic to subtly pop.
 
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When you guys are doing your gloss/matte finishes, are you applying them to the entire face of the enclosure or are you only applying them to any graphics/text you've added to the layout?
I usually do a gloss on only the graphics I've introduced. For the Siren above, the entire artboard was covered in graphics, so I just threw down a solid rectangle in the gloss layer.
 
I'm brand new to illustrator and trying to prep some art for a print. It's I think a pretty simple layout but I'm not sure how to do some of the final steps. I have a bunch of pen strokes that I applied brushes to that are overlapping and I'm not sure if I need to "flatten" them down to make sure that they print with the right transparency/opacity? I also have to knock out a section of dark "ink" to let the white text show through so I just made a copy of the white text (using white as the fill instead of the Roland swatch) and put it in the color layer. I converted all the text to paths so there would be no issue with fonts but other than that I left all the objects and paths as I created them in Illustrator.

I wouldn't mind just sending it and trying out the print, but 10 days is a long time to trouble shoot some art. I exported a PDF of the artwork and then converted that into a JPEG to post here and it looks like I expected it too but I'm a bit nervous about the print process not working like a regular laser printer...
 

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I'm brand new to illustrator and trying to prep some art for a print. It's I think a pretty simple layout but I'm not sure how to do some of the final steps. I have a bunch of pen strokes that I applied brushes to that are overlapping and I'm not sure if I need to "flatten" them down to make sure that they print with the right transparency/opacity? I also have to knock out a section of dark "ink" to let the white text show through so I just made a copy of the white text (using white as the fill instead of the Roland swatch) and put it in the color layer. I converted all the text to paths so there would be no issue with fonts but other than that I left all the objects and paths as I created them in Illustrator.

I wouldn't mind just sending it and trying out the print, but 10 days is a long time to trouble shoot some art. I exported a PDF of the artwork and then converted that into a JPEG to post here and it looks like I expected it too but I'm a bit nervous about the print process not working like a regular laser printer...
You're going to need to ensure that none of the strokes are overlapping. The UV printing process doesn't render like a laser printer, it takes each vector literally and will print all of them, overlapping.

On Tayda's UV printing page: https://www.taydaelectronics.com/hardware/enclosures/enclosure-uv-printing-service.html
It states the following:
"***THERE ARE 2 IMPORTANT THINGS IN COLOR LAYER,
- DIFFERENT COLOR THINGS OVERLAPPING EACH OTHER IN COLOR LAYER, LET'S SAY YOU HAVE A BLUE CAT ON RED HOUSE, LET'S SAY CAT IS OVERLAPPING ON HOUSE, YOU NEED TO REMOVE PART OF HOUSE THAT CAT OVERLAPPING, IT IS EASY IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR, JUST SELECT AND CAT AND HOUSE AND UNDER PATHFINDER SECTION CLICK MERGE AND SOFTWARE WILL DO THE JOB FOR YOU AND REMOVE ANYTHING FROM BACKGROUND OF CAT. IN OTHER WORDS, IN COLOR LAYER, OVERLAPPING DIFFERENT COLOR THINGS ARE NOT ALLOWED. (EXCEPT WHITE AND COLOR IS OVERLAPPING, THIS IS ALLOWED AND SOMETIMES IT IS NECESSARY)"

I would prepare the file the way that they ask for it to ensure that your results are satisfactory. Best of luck!
 
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