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Looking good!

Looks amazing I'm still having a play around with it wish it was easier to transfer designs from illustrator to the silhouette software, my biggest issue so far has been sizing.

Are you using Silhouette Connect? It handles the files fairly well from Illustrator without much fuss.

I normally use DXF files to send files over - it only reads your basic line and spline options, which is fine for 2D design work anyway.

Anywho - back in the jungle... The palm looks pretty good. Depending on what I am doing - I will sometimes cut on colored paper, cut on white paper that I have printed a photo on, cut on white paper and paint afterwards or cut on paper thin styrene.

There are a lot of other plants that are good candidates for fleshing out your jungles. Elephant Ears, Cut Leaf Philodendron, Tree Ferns, Banana Trees and of course many other forms of palms besides the common form you went with this time (fans, foxtail, cycads...not strictly palm, but still), Arrow Heads, Lotus, Lilly Pads for water bound areas - I have even done bamboo with the plotter (though etching allows for finer "leaves").

Foliage is often overlooked when it comes to gaming - but it really does set the stage and provide good color items to delineate between temperate farmland and tropical rainforests. Paper is plenty durable as well - especially if you give it a good coat of acrylic once cut (basically becomes fiber reinforced plastic as the acrylic soaks into the paper).

Sean_OBrien, do you have a website or a blog with some of the things you've done? You have some good insight and I'd love to see some of your work.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:
Are you using Silhouette Connect? It handles the files fairly well from Illustrator without much fuss.

I normally use DXF files to send files over - it only reads your basic line and spline options, which is fine for 2D design work anyway.

Anywho - back in the jungle... The palm looks pretty good. Depending on what I am doing - I will sometimes cut on colored paper, cut on white paper that I have printed a photo on, cut on white paper and paint afterwards or cut on paper thin styrene.

There are a lot of other plants that are good candidates for fleshing out your jungles. Elephant Ears, Cut Leaf Philodendron, Tree Ferns, Banana Trees and of course many other forms of palms besides the common form you went with this time (fans, foxtail, cycads...not strictly palm, but still), Arrow Heads, Lotus, Lilly Pads for water bound areas - I have even done bamboo with the plotter (though etching allows for finer "leaves").

Foliage is often overlooked when it comes to gaming - but it really does set the stage and provide good color items to delineate between temperate farmland and tropical rainforests. Paper is plenty durable as well - especially if you give it a good coat of acrylic once cut (basically becomes fiber reinforced plastic as the acrylic soaks into the paper).

For me, foliage was one of the first things I thought of doing (and for this reason, my first project) because it really does seem like something that is overlooked too often. I've always wanted to do a tropical table but the lack of good, inexpensive options for doing the needed plants has always been a limiting factor. Now I can look for other reasons not to actually get that project done..

Now that you guys have had awhile to play with your plotters what do you think of them? What kind of results have you had?

And how did the decal tests go?

I should be buying the Silhouette Portrait next weekend. It'll probably take me a while to get familiar with the program but I hope to start using it to produce some terrain as soon as possible. I'll stick it up here as and when I get round to it.

To get the most from the machine you really could do with tracking down a copy of adobe illustrator and use the additional silhouette connect plugin to cut with.
Corel draw is another option but I found there's more tutorials to ease the learning curve with illustrator than there were for corel and I had a few bugs in cuts with corel that have never arisen with illustrator.
Fantastic little machine for the price and can do so much with a little thought.

My Silhouette Portrait should be here this week. Between Relic Knights on Tuesday and this, it’s going to feel like Christmas came early this year

The studio program that comes with it takes a lot of getting used to, but is not too hard to work with. I laid out some Jerry Cans in about an hour with zero prior experience with the program just to see how hard it would be. The replicate feature is truly cool even if it does waste a lot of space.