Laser Cutting a Custom City Map

1. Intro to the Custom Map Course: A very popular gift that laser cutter owners can create our custom city maps. People love receiving one of their hometown like this one that I designed and made of New York City. They can vary in size, materials, and layout. Hey, there, I'm Tim. I'm an architect and crafted with over a decade of experience designing products for digital fabrication. I share my process on YouTube where you can watch and learn about all of my unique architecture, laser-cut products and 3D printed projects. I've been fascinated by custom laser-cut project ever since my time in architecture school. And my favorite types of projects are three-dimensional ones where pieces are carefully designed and laser-cut, then assembled to create a larger product. If this is your first time designing and crafting a custom city map, Don't worry, I'll walk you through my entire process, including all of the mistakes that I make along the way so that you can avoid them. We'll start this course by going over the creation process, where we'll create a collage of smaller maps to create a larger and higher resolution one and Adobe Photoshop. Then we'll move into Adobe Illustrator where we'll create different layers for cutting and engraving with our laser cutter. Last but not least, I'll show you my entire assembly process. We're about to go on a fun journey together of creating a custom city map with a laser cutter. I can't wait to teach you my process which you can apply to all your future custom map projects. Let's get started. 2. Finding the Best Workflow for You: Before we dive into the process of creating a custom map, I wanted to take a moment to talk to you about discovering the best workflow for you for whatever project or software that you plan to use. Early on in my career as an architect, I remember learning how to use a new software by taking courses in school with a professor and watching an online tutorials like this Skillshare course. At that time, all I was trying to do is pass the course by copying exactly what the teacher was doing. Looking back at those days, I wish I had this one little piece of advice. Follow the steps that you see. But remember that there's more than one way to do the same thing. As you take this course. I highly recommend that you watch each lesson from start to finish without following along, then restart that lesson again, and pause each video along the way to learn the process by actually creating what you're seeing. If you have a question, go to the discussion part of this course and ask it there. By the end of this class, you'll have the basic tools that you need to create custom maps, practice those tools and discover your own way of using them to create products that are unique to you. Okay, let's get started with this first lesson where I'll show you how to use snazzy maps to create the base image for this project. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Creating a Map with Snazzy Maps: For this project, the first thing we need to do is create a custom map that consists of an image and vectors. Laser cutters are able to read images and easily engrave them. But not all laser cutters are able to read an image and create exact outlines of objects that are in them. To create a layered map, we need to be able to separate the perimeter of elements like land and water from one another and turn the outline into a vector for laser cutting or engraving. To do this, and the easiest way we need to create a clean black and white map of the city or region that we want to turn into a custom piece. Here's my process of using a website called snazzy maps to create the base image for this project. So the first thing we'll do is open up a new browser and go to snazzy maps.com. Once you get here at the very top of the window, click on Build a map, close the ad that comes up. If you have one. Once you get to this screen here, you'll see that it just pulls a map straight from Google. What we're actually looking for is a black and white map so that in Photoshop or Illustrator, we can select the different layers separately and actually create different layers for this project. To do that on the left window here, click on Choose a snazzy map style. In this option here I like to use one from epilogue. There's a person named Benjamin zebra who created this one here. And just by clicking on it, it'll turn his entire map black and white. Now click on Apply Style. The other part of this is finding a specific location that you want to use for your map. Let me just zoom somewhere else so that I can show you how this works. I want to create one of New York City, but let's say I just started somewhere random like this area here. I would scroll down, go to size and location and click. The first thing we want to do here is click on this area here for height and change it from pixels to present, and change the height to 100%. Once that's set, scroll down to center location. This will bring us straight to the area that we want to create for this map. If you know the exact latitude and longitude, which I never know, then you can just type it in. But if you don't know it like me, click on search for a location and type into city or address that you're planning to use. In my case, I want to use New York because it's my hometown. Now you can see that there's different levels of Zoom that'll actually reveal more levels of detail as you're going in by using your mouse wheel or by using the zoom level tab here. As you do that, you can see that there is more detail showing up as I zoom in closer and closer. For example, you can now see the World Trade Center fountains here. And you can also see all of this, these docs here in this location by the water. As I zoom out, all of that detail starts to go away. And instead, the streets become major intersections. As I zoom out further, it actually just becomes the major highways. And as I keep zooming out, it'll get to a point where all I have is a world map which could be really cool for a layered project where you have the water in a different color, wood or different colored material. And then the top layer could be all of the different continents and countries. Now let's zoom back into New York so I can show you the next step. The level of detail that I'm looking for, for my project is going to be a zoom level of 12 were all I see are the major roads in New York City as well as all of the land and rivers. I'm not looking for something too detailed because this here will take a long time to engraver cut and to coordinate. And I also want to show a little bit more of New York City instead of zooming in until it's just one little area like the lower portion of Manhattan. So instead, I'm just going to zoom out to a level 12 and then I'll show you how we can stitch this entire thing together so that we actually have some of Brooklyn in it, some of queens, some of Manhattan, sum of New Jersey and the Bronx at the north. To do that, I'll zoom back to 12 and then I'll click Apply Changes, and then I'll scroll down and double-check that there aren't any other settings that I want to adjust. I think we're good here. I'm going to click this button on this tab for this window just to collapse it so we can enlarge this view of the map on my keyboard. I'm also going to press F11, which is going to close out the rest of my web browser. Now here, I can scroll around and have this larger view of the map that I'm trying to create. The first thing I'm going to do is get rid of this advertisement at the bottom right by clicking the X. Then the next thing I'm going to do is pull up what's called the Snipping tool on my computer. You can also just take screenshots, but I find that this is easy for me to control with the Snipping Tool. I'm going to start by finding the area of New York City that I want to have as my left border and my bottom border. And what we're going to do is take several screenshots going across to the right and then going up north so that we can stitch them all together and have a high-quality and high resolution map of New York City with this kind of graphic style. For my map, I'm going to start somewhere around here. And I'm going to pull up the Snipping Tool, click on New. Click and drag across the screen and make sure that you don't get any of these little icons or any of this data in the bottom right, we're just looking for the map itself. When I'm satisfied with it, I'll let go of my mouse clicking button, and then I'll save this map in a folder. And label it, I'm going to call this New York layered map 01. Now we go back to the same web browser and click and drag across your screen so that you can move towards the right. What you want to do is you want to keep a portion of the map from that previous screenshot within the new one so that when we're stitching it, it's easy to align in Photoshop. I'll show you how to do that in the next step. But for now, let's take some more screenshots here. I'll pull up this Snipping Tool, click on New, click and drag across the screen. And save this as 0 too. Now we go back to the map again. You move to the right. Now wants something around here. Now pull up that snipping tool again. Click and drag across and save this. I actually think that I'll do one more going to the right that I can finish off these little islands just so that I can get this little tip right here. Now, hold backup, the snipping tool, like New. Take a snip of all of this. Save this as 0. For. Now we know that the width of our full map will be about four of these different screen captures. So now what I'll do is I'll go up. I want to retain some of the islands because it was in the previous screenshot. And if you forget, you can just pull up the snipping tool and see where it was. You can see I have some of this main island right here, which is right here. I'll pull up that screen capture. Hit New and snip this area right here. I'll save this one as 05. Now we go back to this web browser and we just continue this going back to the left about four times and then going up again. You do this until you have the entire map that you're looking for. But at this level of detail, now I'm just going to show you the process of doing it, but I'll speed it up so that it's a little bit quicker. Now that we have all of this snips of the map here, we're going to leave this window open just in case we need to come back to it. And that's my process of creating the base map for this project. In the next lesson, we'll bring these images into Photoshop and collage them together to create a larger and higher resolution map. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Photoshopping a High Res Map Part 1: Now that we have a high-resolution map of the city or region, the next step is to turn parts of this image into vectors for laser cutting and engraving. So the first thing that I do is I open up Photoshop. Then I open up the folder where I saved all of the images from snazzy maps. Here, the one thing to keep in mind is that every four images we're going from left to right, then we're going vertically upward, and then we're going from right to left. And then we're going up again and then left to right and repeat. The reason why I'm mentioning this is because it'll help us quickly and efficiently goes through this process of stitching everything together. Now in Photoshop, Let's just start by going to File New and creating a canvas. I'm just going to leave it at whatever size I have here because I probably set this up for a different type of project or reason. Once I have this, I'll go up here to Image, go to Canvas size, and I'll just increase. This is something gigantic and enroll organized as later and actually crop it down to whatever size we want. For now, we just needed to be big enough to fit all of the images that we took from snazzy maps. For my width, I'm going to say 60 inches. For the height, I'm going to say 60 inches. This is going to be a gigantic Canvas. Now that I have this here, I'll go back to that folder and start with layered map 01. Right-click it, go to Open With fine Photoshop and click. Once we're here, go down to the bottom right, right-click it in your layers or wherever it's located for you, find it and right-click the layer that says background and hit Duplicate. Here in this pop-up window where it says destination document. Click on this tab here so that it drops down and find the untitled project that we just created and hit. Okay. Now in that project you can see this tiny little stub of that map. And it's because we made the canvas size really big. Don't adjust anything, just keep it as it is. The one thing that I will do is go to the layer and actually labeled this snazzy maps the 01 or whatever you want to label it. But this is just to help us keep it organized in our mind. To do that, I double-click and I type in snazzy maps 01. Once I do that, I make sure I have the mouse cursor selected so I can click and drag it, and I'll move it just to the bottom left. Now we can close out this window. Go back to the folder, open up 0 to repeat it again. If instead of right-clicking and hitting Duplicate, you wanted to just do this quicker. You can actually click, left-click on the image. Hold. Go up here to untitled 01. Come down here and let go of your mouse click. And you'll see that it just drags it right in. This is a lot quicker than doing the duplicate method that I showed you. But doing the duplicate method has its own advantages for certain types of projects. So that's one thing that I've been doing for all of my workflow just so that I can keep that in mind. Now here I'm going to relabel this to snazzy maps 0 to now I'm just going to repeat this process with all of the different maps, but I'm going to just lay it out just like this with a little space between them. And then we'll go one-by-one and start attaching them together. I'll speed this part up since I just showed you how I would bring them in. And then once we get to the next step, I'll come back and I'll walk you through how I would stitch it together. Now let me just stop here for a second and just explain how all of these are being organized on his canvas because I think it'll start tying in. What I was talking about earlier was our file structure here. So I had the first four images brought in and you can see how I went from left to right. Now that we're on the fifth one, we went vertically when we were taking the screen snips. And once we went vertically, we started going back towards the left. If you could see that image number five I just placed right here. And the reason why we do, why we did that is because when you zoom in and look at it, you can actually see a little sliver of that island here in that fifth image. You can see it down here in the fourth image later, what we're going to do is we're basically going to take this and figure out where it lands within each image so we can stitch them together and actually create a larger map, which you can start to see happening here is I'm just overlaying. Now let me finish this step and then I'll show you how I would do that once we're done bringing all of the different SNPs into this Canvas. Okay, Now that we have all of these maps imported and organized, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to use the crop tool on the left bar here. I'm just going to crop it to this size of that art. A Canvas isn't this big and will reorganize this later. But for now this will just help us keep everything organized and tight. To do the next step here, I'm going to be using control plus to zoom in and Control minus to zoom out just as my hotkeys. So as you see me doing this and doing this is because I'm doing Control Plus on my keyboard to go in, control minus to come out. The other part that I'm going to be doing is going to be changing the opacity of the layers. I'm going to come here to my layer panel, wherever it is for you to find your layer panel. And if you don't see it, go up to Window and find layers. Once you have your layer panel open, select all of them except for number one, and change the opacity to something like 50%. You can see that just by changing this opacity here, if I made it lower, it's actually a lot lighter. So find one that would work for you and you can adjust it as we're going along this next step. But for me I'm going to stick somewhere around 50%. Now, I'm going to switch back to the cursor, which here in this window just let us click and drag anything here. And if you mess up, you can hold Control and press Z to go back. Now, I'm going to start by going in order from one all the way up to 20 because I have 20 different a SNPs from the sniffing steps. I'm going to select layer number to zoom in. And I know that layer number two is actually this one right here to the right side of the one that's completely opaque. When I zoom in, I come to this level. Now click and drag it over. And I'll start to align the different islands and a different land and river areas with the one underneath. You can see how I'm almost there already. This part of the island here is the same as this part of the island here. I'm going to click and drag it over and align it as best as I could. And once I get it somewhere close like this, it looks like it's exactly where I want it to be. You see how it just kind of snapped in place and now at disappeared. If I zoom out, you can see exactly where all of the other lines are and where the two images actually start to extend itself. And here you can see I missed a little bit at the top, but that's fine because we have the top layer that will overlap a little bit. But this is exactly what we're looking for. A tip that I have is if you're doing this with a map and you end up somewhere like this where it's a little bit off. You can actually use the arrow keys on your keyboard to shift and nudge the layer that you've selected up, down, left and right. Here. I'm just going to use the up arrow to push that image up. And you can see it's starting to get into place. And if you go too far, it'll look really weird. So you can just keep doing this until you find the right alignment. And if you ever wanted to nudge it a lot more than these little increments? Hold the shift button on your keyboard and use the arrow key and it will nudge it a lot more than it was. Here. I'm not going to hold Shift because I'm so close. I'm just going to press the up arrow until it overlaps. Once I'm satisfied with it, I'll change the opacity of this layer to 100%. And now you can see that we're just about there. He looked a little bit weird though. If we go back to 50%, you can see how the map looks like it's shifted a little bit. So I'm just going to change it back to a 100%. And CFI might've missed something. It looks like the map moves a little bit to the bottom left. Let's see if I missed if I miss something here. I think we're pretty good. I'm just gonna change this to 100% and keep it where it is. And now we're going to repeat this with the next one. Now we scroll over. We find layer number three and drag it over. Now, we go over again, zoom in and find the areas that line. So I can see all these islands here in this area are actually the islands over here in that area. Just drag this over a line, that small one. And it looks like I'm right about there. Now. It looks fuzzy because it's not fully aligned. Now we just need to figure out where it should go. That's it right there. And now we changed this layer to a 100% hold Control and zoom out. It's good. Now we bring the next layer over. We do this again with this layer. So now we zoom in. We find the points and the islands that align. It looks like we're just about there. I think we're right there. Let's change this to a 100%. That looks pretty good to me. Now when we get to number five. Layer number five, you can see that everything that we had going from left to right actually squeezed down. What I'll do is I'll select the first four layers, bring them over to the right. And then now I can start bringing in and just merging all of these one-by-one. Something else that I wanted to briefly mention, because as we're going through this, you can probably see that there's other ideas that could be developed just by having these maps laid out like this. For example, if you really wanted to, I like seeing these borders between all of the different maps. So if you ever wanted to create a project and he laid your board out like this. Sometimes you can get really cool ideas of how you can create a map of different pieces. And literally laser cut each of these as separate pieces that come together in real life, but they might be 20 different pieces that create a bigger map, especially if you're a laser cutter is smaller and you wanted something slightly bigger for my project. I just want a small map, so that's why I'm stitching everything. But just keep in mind that you could also split your map up afterward done, and create a much larger collage in real life. So now let's zoom in. Let's bring map number five over. You can see that I'm going to overlay with what layer number four here or layer number six here. And so I don't want to do that, so I'm just going to select the bottom layers, drag them all over to the right. And we're just gonna start again and start bringing these layers down and attaching them. I'll select layer number five. Scroll over, Zoom in and repeat the steps that we just did. Now, I liked that these islands here looked like these islands here. Now pull them right over, overlay them. That looks like it got it. Say 100% opacity, That's all sets. Select number six, scroll over, select this map, find the ones that overlap. Looks like this one's a bit tricky. I think this part of this land is actually this part of this land down in the bottom right. That should go right there. That looks like it. Now, switch that to a 100%. We're all set. Now, zoom out, select layer number seven. I'm just going to complete this with this entire map. And if I happen to miss a spot, like there's a spot here that I'm a little bit concerned about, which is this area here where the map is missing. You can always go back to your browser and actually take that snip again. That's why I was talking about leaving that browser opened before. Is if you leave the browser open, you can just go straight to it and pull anything else that you need here by just zooming over to it, pulling it, saving it as another image, and then bringing it straight into Photoshop and just placing it right here. But I think I'll be covered here because I did include more of the bottom portion of the map. So now I'm going to speed this process up and then I'll come back and talk to you about the next step. Once I'm done collaging these pieces together. 5. Photoshopping a High Res Map Part 2: Okay, Now we're done stitching all of these different images together and you can see what the map looks like. There was one part of this where I actually miss the sliver of this entire roadway here in New Jersey. But one of the things that I wanted to mention here is that for my-map, I actually don't want to include this much of the western area of New York City, which is now in New Jersey. I just wanted to have as much as I could so that I can pick the areas of this map that I want to use. And so this area here that's not within the areas that I'm going to be cropping it to. I'm just going to leave that portion out. What I'm going to do now is I'm actually just going to figure out how much of New York City I want to have in my project. Right now, I'm just going to select the crop tool and bring it to a size that I think is going to be what I'd like to use for the project. So there's two ways we could do this. We could either crop it this way and literally find the areas that we think we wanted to use and do the rest in Illustrator, which is my preferred way. Or we can actually go and go to the Image tab, come down to Canvas size and type in an exact canvas size that we want to use. For mine, I'm going to use the crop tool and do the actual sizing in Illustrator, which is the next step of this project. So for this, I'm just going to make sure that I'm cropping a lot of this area, but that I don't get any of the areas that were missing. So you can see that right here where the road doesn't connect, that's where I don't want to include any portions of the map. So instead I'll stop at somewhere here on my left side. I'll zoom out. Now just get as much of this map as I could so that we can figure out the sizing one we're in Adobe Illustrator. Something like this looks good to me and I'm actually going to be using a vertical portion of it, which is probably going to be somewhere here so that I can have a vertically formatted map in Illustrator. But I just wanted to get as much as I could here in Photoshop so that I can pick and choose when I'm in Illustrator later. Now we can extend this out. Save it. Now that we have this map crop down to the size that we want, the next step is going to be merging all of these layers here so that we only have one layer. And making sure that this map is in black and white only. We can do both of those in one simple step by going up to the Image Mode. Grayscale, flatten this card. Now you can see it merged all of those layers together. I always like to have an extra layer of the original image before I make any edits to it. So what we're going to do is keep this background layer, but we're going to right-click on it, click Duplicate Layer and click Okay. Then we can click the eyeball to hide the background layer and the background copy we're going to call this one land. What we're going to do is we're going to separate the water from the land. To do that, we're going to be using this tool here called the Quick Selection Tool. Right now, I have my brush set to 35, which is the size of the circle. Let me zoom in so you can see it. Now you can see as I'm tracing it automatically start highlighting all of the areas that are black. Let me just undo that so I can show you how to resize the brush. To do it, I use the bracket facing on the right side, which is to the bottom-left of Backspace on the keyboard to make it larger. And the other one to make it smaller. You can also just click up here and resize it by clicking and dragging this little slider here. You can also change the hardness and the spacing, which actually lets you select less or more based on how close you are to a different color. I will just go down here and change this to about 80%. Then I'm just going to use my keyboard to increase and decrease the size, like I was telling you, it's the bracket to the right to make it larger, the bracket to the left to make it smaller. So the goal with using this tool is going to be highlighting only the major waterways that we're seeing here. I don't want to get everything in between all of the pieces of land because if we get all of the water flowing through, it's going to take so long to coordinate and organize every piece. The goal that I have is just the cut-out, the big pieces of land as this top layer of my project. And all of the water will actually just be the bottom layer material, which is going to be a rectangle. But because we all cut this land out as these shapes, it'll read as the bottom layer being just a major waterways and gluing that second piece on top, we'll give it the depth so that you can see the land on top of it. And then we're going to just engrave all of the different roadways that we're seeing and all of the rivers that go between the land here. I'll show you that when we get to the making part of this video. But for now we just need to be able to select. All of the major waterways, which is what this quick selection tool will help us do. To do that, I'll start in this large area here and show you how I would select all of this water. So do it. I'll just left-click and you can see it already selected this little area. If you left-click and hold and you move around and it'll start increasing that size. But just make sure that at the top left of the window, you don't have it here as subtract because what I'm actually doing now is just subtracting what I selected. What you want to use is either the plus one, the regular Quick Selection one, I'll just use the regular Quick Selection, which is the very left option here. And we'll just click hold and drag. And now you can see it's starting to snap to all of the land. Not what we want to see. Now it made its way all the way into here. So I'm just going to zoom in so that we can get a little bit more precise with this brush. I'm going to decrease the size of it and work my way in. But I do want to stop where it starts to get really, really tight in here. Now you can see it's selected a lot more of this. What will end up happening is actually going to be cutting out these islands that we're seeing here and they won't even be in this actual project. I know that that's not as accurate as most people would want it to be. But just because of the size of my map, that island will get lost anyway. I'm going to cut it out with this entire river so that we have this really big expansive water coming into Manhattan. And then I'm going to try my best to just get in here and select all of these little rivers that flow through to separate the island because I think that's really important to have. So let's just make our way in there by scrolling over, zooming in, changing the size of the brush so that it's a little bit smaller. And then just working our way through. Now you can see it's actually getting into the island, which is what we don't want to get rid of that you go up here in the top left of the window and you change it to this brush here with the minus which says subtract from selection. Now you can just click and hold and get rid of it so that it just snaps it to the land itself. Now that's looking a lot better. Now we can make our way all the way through and start connecting this. So I will go back to the plus icon which is adding to the selection. I think the reason why it was selecting the land is, Is my brush size was too big, so let me zoom in, change my brush size so that it's smaller and work through these little river ways. Now if it's selected more, I'm going to switch back to the subtract and subtract these areas out. And then go back here to the plus and had more areas as we're going. I actually don't want to have these ones here going inward because once a customer piece out, it'll be very hard to try and tie any of these smaller inlets. Just get rid of these areas here. If this happens and you just can't seem to get it to select the right area. Then you can just go back and forth until you finally get it to align into go just along the inner edges of this river. If you have any more issues, you can actually use this polygonal lasso tool. Set it to the subtract option, which is all the way on the right side here in the top-left of the window. It says intersect with selection and you have subtract from selection, chooses subtract from selection one, which is the second from the right. And then you can just left-click and draw to subtract whichever areas you don't want from this. You can see now that it basically removed this portion from my selection, but I want that as part of it. So that's just showing you in case in went inland and you wanted to get rid of something in here, you can just subtract it. Now let's continue with the Quick Selection Tool here. Now you see it went into that river area. Now just to get rid of it, how does use the Polygonal Lasso with the subtract feature? Just subtract these shapes out. Now we can continue at the bottom here. And then we can subtract this land over here. We can subtract these over here. I'm just gonna do this until I get around the entire image and have one big waterway. And then I will show you the next step after that. So I'll speed up this part of the process now. Alright, now that we have all of these waterways selected, we still need to have this selection tool as our primary tool on his canvas. And what we'll do is we'll right-click, go down to layer via cut. And now what this does is it actually separates the water layer from the land layer and it makes it look something like this. You can see that there's some areas of water that was inland like I was talking about. You could go through and select all of these so that you have it as a separate layer for the next step. But for what I'm trying to do, these would actually take a long time to coordinate. Instead, my major waterways are just these areas here. And what I'm going to do an Adobe Illustrator is actually make a selection of just this here. And I'm going to trace out all of the land in Adobe Illustrator so that those are vectors that we can laser cut. And a reason for that is I want these bigger areas of just the land itself with all of the roads as my top layer. And I want to engrave the rest of the waterways and all of these major intersections throughout the city. I'm also going to be cropping this entire thing that we're probably going to be looking at, something that's more vertical. And it might not even include the areas of the waterway that was missing in that bottom right portion here that you saw. The next step is saving the layers as two separate PNG files where we're going to save this first one as just the land itself by going to File Save As New York City math and changing the format to PNG and labeling this one as land hitting. Okay. Now that it's done saving, we turn off the land layer and we turn onto water layer. I'm gonna go back to File Save As. And we can change this to PNG if I change it to New York City and mapped water, save it. And then you can also save this entire file as a Photoshop file, which is how you can come back to this in the future for any future maps that you want to make of this specific area. In the next lesson, I'll show you my process of using Adobe Illustrator to easily create the vectors. I'll see you there. 6. Illustrator - Outlining Map Boundaries Part 1: With the PNG files of different layers of the map that we created, we need to turn the outlines into vectors that we can laser cut or engrave them. To do this, we'll be using simple functions in Adobe Illustrator to create outlines that separate the land and water in the image, which will allow us to create a two-layer map, will also design a simple frame to inset the map and clean up the border around it. Here's my process in Adobe Illustrator. Here in Adobe Illustrator, the first step is to go up to file and hit New. And in this pop-up here you can see that I already have the custom size of my boards setup so that it fits the maximum cutting size of my glow Forge laser cutter, which is 19.5 inches wide by 11 inches tall. Now that it's set, I'll just click Okay. In this area here, I actually want this map to be vertical. I don't want it to be horizontal, but the reason why I didn't change it in net first step is because I like having that preset. So every project that I designed always has this as the baseline to change this so that it's vertical. I'll go to Document Setup, Edit Artboards, click on this board and change the width of it to 11 inches and a height to 19.5. Before I hit Enter, I'm actually going to switch this because the material that I'm actually using is a maximum of about 18.2 inches wide. It's a piece of plywood that someone else already pre-cut and I purchased. In terms of the height here, I'm actually going to update this and change it to 18 inches so that I don't go past the bounds of the actual material. Once that set, I hit the escape button on my keyboard. And this is what it looks like. Now that we're at this step, we go to File Place. We've put in both the land, and we go back to File Place and we've put in the water. Now you can see both of these layered on really well. For now I'm going to click and drag over both, right-click and group them together. Then I'm going to move it off of the board. Then move it so that the bottom and left edges are aligned. Just so I can see where we're starting from here. Now I'm going to use this rectangle tool. Click and drag from the top left to the bottom right. Left-click and select everything here. Right-click and make clipping mask. What that does is it just crops it down to the size of that board just so we can see what we're dealing with here. Now that we can see everything that's going to be within the cutting area. I'm actually going to re-size the map this way so that we can keep double-checking until we liked the area of the map that we're going to be cutting for the project. I actually want Manhattan to be at the center and I wanted to be larger. I want a little bit of Brooklyn down here is at least the boundaries of it. And I don't want the top area here of the Hudson Valley to be as large as it is. To resize it. I'm going to double-click here. We can go into this click on that image file that we grouped. And you can see beyond the boundary of that rectangle, the actual size of that image. Zoom out using Control Minus like we did with Adobe Photoshop. Click on that top-right tab right here. Hold shift so that it's proportional and just drag to make it larger. It's getting to where I want it to be. So let's just do it again. I just, I'm trying to get less of the Hudson Valley in here. Let's go a little bit more. Alex, just about right now, double-click outside of the image. Zoom in using control plus. Let's see where we land. I like where it is, where Manhattan is here at the center, but it looks like I made it a little too big because Manhattan is actually a little too far up in this page. I'm going to shrink it down by double-clicking, zooming out, clicking on the image, and just doing what I did before, but this time shrinking it a bit. I think that looks good. So let's double-check by zooming back in. I like the way that this looks. The next step is going to be clicking this right-clicking, releasing the clipping mask, clicking on a rectangle that we have and deleting it for now. Then we're going to click on the map itself and right-click and ungroup it. What I'm going to do a separate them into different layers. In my layer panel I have layer one, which everything is in. I'm going to click on Create New Layer. I'm going to click on the very top one and click and drag this little color from layer one to layer two. I'm going to click the eyeball and layer two to turn off the water. Now I actually want the water to be on the lower layer. I'm just going to reorganize by clicking and dragging layer to below layer one. Now that that's set, I'm going to turn off the eyeball on layer one just so I can see what I'm working with here. Now. Just keep in mind from now moving forward, we don't want to click and drag anything like this. So just undo that. We always want them to be aligned. And so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to click on this water image and click on Live Trace. Going to click Okay. Now that it's done tracing, I'm going to expand it. You can see it selects everything here. Now I'm going to right-click and ungroup everything. Now we can actually go in and delete all of the white. By doing this, we only have these black waterways fully traced and outlined. And when you're trying to laser cut it, you don't want the fill, you only want the outline of all of this. I wanted to hold Control on my keyboard and press a, so it selects all of them. I'm going to come up here to the color panel and turn off all the color by clicking this square with the line through it. And it's going to get rid of all the color. Now I'm going to click on this one here with the inner square just so that I can have only the outline in a color. I'm going to make it black. Now you can see that when we laser cut this, it'll cut out all of this shape. Now what we need to do is take the other layer of only the land. We actually need to have this only cut out the land. The easiest way that I've found to outline only the land in here without outlining everything within it by using the Live Trace feature is actually going back to Photoshop and turning the entire land layer of black. To do that, we can hide the water layer, right-click on land. Duplicate that layer, hiding the actual original land. And here in the copy, going up to Image, going down to adjustments, going down two levels, and bringing all of the color down so that it's just black. You go to output levels, you click on it his white side and you bring it to the other side. Once you do that, you only have the land highlighted. And was that we can go to File Save As, go to PNG as the file type. Go over here to land and name this one land, outline and hit, Save. Hit. Okay. Go back to Adobe Illustrator. And now this is a tricky part where we have to now re-size it to match this. So go to File Place, find that land one, land outline place. Once it's in here, and put it down here to snap it to that bottom left of that board, to all of the images. I'm just going to turn off the water layer so that it's a little bit easier. What I'm going to do is align here with the actual image of the land. Just resize it to match. And once it's here, we're going to create a new layer. Bring it by clicking that blue dot in the layer panel, bring it up to the Layer three. Renaming this to land outline. So it's clear. This one here is going to be water. Now, what we actually want to do and the reason why I'm doing this, let me just explain really quickly. If you wanted to cut this out of blue acrylic or something like that. This is the layer you would cut for my project. I'm just going to leave the water layer empty, so it's just going to be a darker piece of plywood. And then this layer here is going to be an engraved piece of wood. This image I can engrave, but I just need the outline of the land. And then I'm going to engrave all of the roadways on top like I was saying earlier, to get that outline, we're going to do the same things that we did with water. Now if you wanted to just have the water, just cut this out out of blue acrylic. It'll be the same size. Now we go to the land outline. We click it, we trace it. Click Okay. Once this is done, you right-click on the image. And now you just click it. You click, Expand your right-click, and then you click Ungroup. Once you do that, you can click here and delete all of the white areas. You can also just click the white area because the fill color have you go up to your Color panel, there's white. You can quickly select all the white areas by going up to Select Same Fill Color. And then it'll select all the white colors in here and you hit delete and it gets rid of it. Now we have all of these areas here. Now just hold Control press. And that'll select all of these black infidels. And we wanted to do what we did before with the water area by clicking here on the fill color, getting rid of it by clicking this square with the red line through it, going to the other option for the stroke color and making it black. Now we have the outline of the land. And with that, we can now cut all of this out. We can have this as the engraved layer. We would engrave this first name is land in grave. Move that to the top layer. Now we have the land outlines. So after it's engraved, we can then have this be land in grave, land cut so that it actually cuts this out. And then we'll have these pieces of land with all of this roadway and water engraved onto it. And then if you had a piece of blue acrylic you wanted to use for the water, you could use this layer here for my project. I won't be using that. Now we have all of this setup and the only other part of this is going to be cropping it down to fit onto this board here. 7. Illustrator - Outlining Map Boundaries Outlines Part 2: So to crop everything down here in Adobe Illustrator, I'm going to use the rectangle tool. And I'm going to draw a rectangle just by clicking on a screen anywhere to a width of about 10.5 inches. I think a good height for this project might be 18, so I'll just keep it there. This will be the outside of a frame that I want to make. Then I want the inside of it to be roughly the same size, but I want it to be inset a little bit. So I'm actually going to inset this so that there is a border around the entire thing by half of an inch, which means we need to subtract one inch from the width and a height. That means this will be 9.5 and this will be 17. Once that's drawn, click and drag over both. Then up here, you can use these aligned tools and horizontally aligned in the center, then vertically align the center. And now you've got a nice frame around it. I'm also going to go to the color panel and change this color to RGB and make it red. Now that that's set, I'm going to go back to the layer panel, create a new layer and call this frame. Come here, it's this green square box and drag it up to frame. And now we've got the frame. And now we're going to recolor all of the different objects in this space just so that they're accurate to what the laser cutter needs to know so that it knows what to cut and what to engrave. And we'll set both the land and the water cutouts, two reds that it matches the frame. That way we, at the very least, we'll know that these will be cutout as well. Then we'll set the water and the land cutout to a different color just so that they show up separately in our interface. And we can adjust their settings based on whatever material we're planning to use. To do that, I'll turn off land and I'll turn off Frame. And water is the only layer open. I'll hold Control, press a to select everything on the layer. Go up to the colors, change this to RGB, and drag and bring blue all the way up. Now, blue is going to be the water cutout. Turn that layer off, turn to land, cut on, hold Control, press a to select it all. Go up to the color, change it to RGB, drag blue all the way up and drag read all the way up so that it's purple. Now purple will be the land cutout. So now we just need to bring the frame over to the Canvas itself and align it to where we want it to be, that the map is located where we want to cut it out. I know that the height is 18, which matches the canvas, so I'll just align it there. And then I just want to center it on a canvas that the map is centered within the inner rectangle. I'm also going to go to the layer panel, click and drag frame to the very top, just so we can see it and zoom in. And now we need to start cropping down the image. I'm going to select that inner rectangle of the frame. Go up to edit, copy, edit, paste in place, hold control, and click through it so that it selects the next layer, which is land in grave, right-click and say Make Clipping Mask. Now would clip that entire image to be engraved down to just the inner rectangle of the frame. You can click and drag that box in the layer panel back down to land and graves that were organized with this file. Now that that's done, the next step is going to be turning that layer off by clicking the eyeball. Going into the land cut layer. Turning off the eyeball for the frame layer. Turning off the eyeball for the water layer, going up to Edit, Paste in Place. Now we've got the frame and the same exact spot. Hold Control. Press a to select everything. Right-click, say Make Clipping Mask. Now we've got all of these areas. We want to do the same thing for the water. Go up to Edit, make sure you're on that layer. Go up to Edit, Paste in Place, Control a right-click and make clipping mask. And now we've got all of this ready to go. So now you can see that if we turn every layer back on, let me just turn off the land and engraved layer so that it's clear. Now you can see all of the waterways and land. Now we're going to cut out for this project. I'm going to hide the water layer and show you how I would do the next step using only the land layer. But if you plan to cut the water layer out of another material, you should follow the same steps for that, but I'm only going to show you this step for the land cut out, which is what I'm going to be using for this project. What do we need to do is if we turn off the frame layer, you can see that this is actually not accurate because we need this to finish cutting out the land. And to do that, we need this here to follow the frame, come across and down. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go to Edit, Paste in Place. And now we've got the frame to be cut out from this material here. And I'll show you why in the next step, which is, if we zoom out, we go to Document Setup, Edit Artboards. Let's this art board back around so that it's horizontal, which is how the laser cutter is set up on my end, where everything needs to be codewords wide. I'm going to change this to 18, change this to 11. Hit Escape, turn on all these layers, hold Control and press a, and then go over to the rotate command right here. And then I'm going to just hold Shift, left-click on the board and rotate it 90. Zoom in, make sure we're actually inside of the board itself. We don't want to be outside of it. And then you zoom out. What we're going to do is we're going to go back to Document Setup, Edit Artboards. Hold the Alt button on your keyboard and click and drag this down. See it's copying everything on the board. If you hold and drag it down again, you'll have three of the same copies. And the reason for that is we want to hide the frame and hide the land and grave. Hide the land cut. This here is going to just be the waterway. None at the boards are all set up. One of the things that I need to do since I'm using a glow Forge and or interface can read clipping masks yet, which is how we've cropped this image down. We need to actually go in and change this one up so that we actually trim everything instead of having it crop it down. To do that, I'm going to highlight the entire thing selected. Hold the Alt button on my keyboard, drag it to the left and make a copy. Once it's copied, I will click and drag this map out and look at this area here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this one out just so that I can see where all the lines are. And then I'm going to right-click and release the clipping mask, select this rectangle and add color to the outline. Once I do that, I know where everything should be cut. And I'm going to use the scissor tool which is located right here, or the eraser and knife tools are. And I'm actually going to go around the entire board here and trim everything is I'm going to do that. I'm going to separate this just to a new layer. And I'm going to lock the land cut layer. That way I'm only cutting this land. Now as I'm going, I'm just going to find every location where I need to trim this land. You can see as I'm clicking, I'm just going around finding the intersections and actually trimming them down. Now let me just speed this process up and you can follow along. All you need to do is find where the rectangle intersects and click that line and you will end up trimming the shape out. Then what will happen is we'll highlight the outside shape and just delete it later. That's the idea behind us. Now that it's all trimmed, cut, I'm going to just select everything outside and make sure that I didn't miss any parts of it. It looks like I missed something over here. I missed this line right here. I missed this line right here. I need to release the clipping compound. And then that is it. Now we can delete all of the outside shapes. My highlighting everything and pressing, delete. Something didn't work over here. I think it's because there's a compound. So if you right-click after you select the line, you could release the compound path. And now I should let us only select what was cut. Hit Delete. Getting rid of these. Now we can delete layer five, which was the new layer we made with the rectangle. Come in over here with the pen tool. We can click at the end of this where it says anchor. And click at the end of this where it says anchor. That'll tie them together. We just do that all the way around as an entire project. Now that we have the outline of the land trimmed down to the size of the inside rectangle of the frame. We're going to come down here and delete this map. Then we're going to drag this rectangle up toward should be, and drag layer five into the trash bin to get rid of it. Now this here has become our new cut-out for just the land itself. What we want to do now is align it just by dragging it over so that the left line here snaps with the left side of this map cut-out and leave it up here. Come down to this board. Click and highlight everything on it. And then hold shift and click on the map which we're going to be engraving just to de-select it, press Delete, and we'll get rid of the previous frame and land that was there. Now we can highlight all of this and drag it back down and just make sure that we're covering the image itself. And now we're ready to export all of these. I actually like to export all of the files as a PDF. And what I'm going to do here is I actually have to hide the land and grave because this here has to be exported as a, it as an image file for glow Forge. It can't read this image file that has a clipping mask. What I mean by that is if you right-click a new release, this clipping mask, you'd see how big does map is. I'm just going to undo that and leave this here. But I'm going to hide that layer. And I'm going to export these three as one PDF file by going to File Save As going to PDF. And I'm going to save this as New York City map. Save the file. Now that we're done saving the file as a PDF, I'm going to open up the folder, double-click the PDF. And here is something that I liked to do which is going to Tools. And if it's a multi-page cut like this one here, I like to go to Split Document. And here for max pages I just say one hit. Okay, and it'll split it. Once you close this PDF and check it out, you have your separate pieces from each board just quickly separated into different files for you. Now that that's done, the last thing that we need to do is turn everything off here. Turn on the land and grave layer so that it's only showing this map portion. Go up to File Export. This is a PNG you as a file type, click on Use Artboard range and this is board number one. So I'm just going to say one. And I'm going to say in grave, New York City map in grave. And once you hit Save, I'll save it as medium. This should export it as a PNG file. And now we are ready to import everything into our laser cutter. But when we do, we just need to make sure that this map image is aligned with the actual cutouts that we're going to be using. If you have a laser cutter that can actually read clipping mask, you're lucky because you can skip all of these steps. But if you're using a glow Forge like me and you can't use a clipping mask. You have to do all of this and then make sure that the land is actually aligned with the image and the cut-out itself, which I'll show you in the next step of this course. Now we're ready for the fun part of this project, laser cutting and assembling it to create a custom map. In the next lesson, I'll show you my process of cutting, gluing and applying a simple oil finish. I'll see you there. 8. Laser Cutting and Assembling the Map: Everyone's process of laser cutting and assembling products is different. But there's always so much to learn from seeing someone else's process and applying any lessons learned to your own workflow. Here's my process of cutting and assembling the custom map that we just designed here in the glow Forge interface. I'm going to start by clicking on the import artwork button at the top. You're going to upload and selecting New York City map part one. This is the top layer of the project, or it is going to be all of the land pieces with the roads and the inner rivers engraved onto it. Now you can see that it imported all of the parts of the map that's going to be cut out for the land. And now what we need to do is bring in the layer that will be engraved. So I'm going to click on import artwork again and click on Upload. And here I'm going to click on New York City mapping grave, which was what we export it as a PNG. And click Open. All right, now that the image is imported, it's a little bit hard to see, but when I click it, you can see some of the lines here. But you can also see that the image itself isn't the same size as the land cutouts. So what I need to do is align it with the land cutout. And to do that, I'm going to zoom in by holding Control and zooming my mouse wheel up and dragging so that this top-left corner is aligned with the top-left corner of the cut settings. Once it's there, I'll zoom out, zoom into this bottom right corner, and just click and drag without holding shift. Once that's aligned, we should be all set. There are almost there. Now we can use our arrows on our keyboard to just align the edges. And now let's check the other side and see why this is a little bit oversized. I think we just need to move it down a little bit. I think we should be all set that as it there. Now you can see all the roads running in here on the land. Can see it running on the inside. You can see the edges are aligned. And if you ever want to double-check if the map is correct, you can come in here, back in Illustrator, turn on the frame, turn on the land cutouts, zoom in and just see where everything should be. In some cases it looks like we are just about there with all of our pieces. And if anything passes over the line, I think we'll be fine because the laser cutter should be cutting out the outlines of the land. So it'll cut anything that goes past it by just a little bit. Back here. And my glow Forge interface, it looks like everything is just about there. All we need to do is go into the settings and switch it to whatever materials we're using. I'm going to be using a different plywood from a different source that I have. And so I'm going to switch the cuts settings to something else. But for the engraved setting, I'm going to keep it at what glow Forge has for either maple or walnut plywood. Now, let's jump into the next step, which is laser cutting and assembling this entire project. Custom maps make great gifts, especially when they're made with materials like wood and acrylic. For all of the maps that I've made, I usually stick to two materials which are wood and chip board. Wood has a naturally warm color and tone that makes it work well as home decor, chip board comes in many colors, but white is my favorite for making maps because it's all based on the shadow is created by the subtle depth created by layering the material. This project took roughly three hours to engrave the map and to cut all of the pieces. Large and grave projects like this take a long time because the laser needs to go back and forth across the entire surface of the plywood to create the image of New York City. Wonder first set of pieces were cut. I use blue masking tape to hold the pieces in place while I removed the sheet from my glow Forge. This will help me keep the pieces in the same position for gluing it onto the base. Once the other pieces were caught, I remove them from my laser cutter and place them on my work table. I bring over my maxi care superglue and apply it to the back of the top frame piece. Then I flip it over and attach it to the base piece to create a frame. Next, I separate the map from the plywood sheet and flip it over to apply blue painters tape to the back. After it's applied, I can flip the map over and remove the blue tape from the engraved side of the plywood. This will help me plan where each piece gets attached to the base. Then I start removing the larger pieces one at a time and placing it within the frame without any glue. The idea is to figure out where every piece needs to go and make sure that they'll fit without any issues. I think of it like an easy puzzle where I already know where the pieces need to go, but the waterways won't be attached. As I was doing this with every piece, I realized that another way to create this project and streamline this process would have been to engrave the outlines if every piece onto the base. Now I turn over the piece at the top left of the frame and apply glue at the perimeter and center. I align it with the edges of the frame and press it into place. I repeat this with the remaining larger pieces until they're all glued into place. Now that the map is glued, it's time to bring over a palm sander to remove all the scratches, Burns, and debris stuck on the surface of the map. I carefully send a surface until it's clean and smooth. Next, I pour oil onto the surface of the map and use a lint free cloth to rub it into the wood. I apply the oil finish on all of the surfaces of the map, including the base that represents the waterways. Once the excess oil is wiped off, the layered map of New York City is complete with that. We've completed the project of creating a custom map. Will the laser cutter, the only thing left is to leave you with some parting words into final lesson. I'll see you there. 9. Conclusion & Parting Words: Congratulations on designing and making a custom map of a city or region of your choice. This product makes a great gift for family and friends. And I also know a lot of laser owners who make a lot of these in their downtime and seldom in their shops. As you can probably tell, these maps take a long time to cut, engrave and assembled for mine, which was about ten inches wide by 18 inches long. It took a total of five hours to laser-cut, assemble, and finish. You might be wondering, how much could you potentially sell these maps for the penny on his size, which changes the total time that it takes to make one. I've seen maps like this one that I made cell between three hundred and six hundred dollars or more at the upper end, it really comes down to your brand, your clientele, and the uniqueness of the end-product. Aside from the product, I also wanted to mention that even someone with experience designing and laser cutting lots of different products like me, I still learn a lot through the simple practice of making new products that I haven't made before. Looking back at this project, one thing that I would've added to my laser cut files is that I would've been grade the locations of every piece of the map onto the base material so that I could easily align the piece and glue them into place. However, I've done that with other projects before. And if the piece is a little out of alignment with the outline, it actually shows. Ultimately, every project can be made in so many ways. Every process is different, every maker is unique, and every custom product teaches the maker a new lesson that we can carry into future projects. I hope you enjoyed this Skillshare course and if you did remember to like it and leave a comment so others can find it too. Good luck with all your amazing projects.