the only thing i cannot do is the autocutter file... i ve never seen one... is it hard to use? what program is used and where to buy?
and how do yuo base them?
Regarding cutters, I can certainly lend some expertise. The machines of choice are the Silhouette brand machines (the Curio, the Portrait and the CAMEO). I can't speak about the Curio much other than that I believe it does the cutting necessary. The Portrait will work with Letter sized pages. The CAMEO supports wider materials. I currently use a first-generation CAMEO (I think they're on the 3rd generation) and love it. I previously used a Silhouette SD (which is comparable to the Portrait) and loved it. I can't comment on machines by Cricut or Brother (or others) but I can say this. They need to have some mechanism for calibration otherwise you can't print-and-cut. Moreover, I looked into making compatible files for Cricut, and I found their software not up to the task for what I do. I continue to only support making Silhouette compatible files.
The software, Silhouette Studio, has its quirks, but is free to download and use as far as I know. There are other editions with special features that cost money, but the free version is all I've ever used. The way the machine works is this: When you print, you have to print with special "registration marks" in the corners. The machine's cutfiles include information about these marks, so when you attempt to cut the page, the machine will use an optical scanner to find the marks and calibrate itself, so the cuts are made in the right place. There's a restricted area for putting graphics, because you can't interfere with the reading of the registration marks, and you can't go outside the bounds of the available cutting area. If you'd like to support these machines, you have a couple options.
Option 1: Don't make cutfiles. Just rely on people doing tedious work to use a cutter.This is not altogether terrible for most minis. For terrain and buildings and stuff with larger pieces, this can be problematic. But for minis, you can actually slice apart the image inside Silhouette Studio, line the pieces up with cut lines, print from Silhouette Studio to get the right registration marks and then cut the minis out with the machine. It's a big hassle compared to alternatives, but not impossible.
Option 2: Don't make cutfiles. Just lay things out to make it easy for others to make cutfiles.If you make sure to keep everything within certain boundaries, people can pull the whole page into Silhouette Studio at once and align it with the cut lines. Still a bit of a hassle, but not as bad as having to really cut up the page and slide things around.
Option 3: Don't make cutfiles. Provide proper registration so your PDF can be printed normally, and let someone else make the cutfiles.This is kind of a sweet-spot for letting the community help out. My opinion is this - if you don't own a cutter and don't know if you have all that many customers that make the extra effort worth your time, just make it easy for cutfile creation and leave it to the community. I have a couple different PNG files I've shared that include registration marks. They can be included as layers in a PDF. If you include them and do nothing else, someone may make cutfiles and share them with the world.
Option 4: Make cutfiles.You'll still want to do one of two things. Either include the registration marks in the PDF so users can print and cut easily, or include your artwork inside the cut files, and make cutter users always print from Silhouette Studio.
I've made a lot of cutfiles, and I've experienced options 1 - 4 first-hand. I'll explain my experiences here, with some references:
Option 1: When I fell in love with my cutter, there were a LOT of minis that didn't have cutfiles. There still are... But I have some sets that were formatted for A4 paper that I couldn't even print on Letter sized paper, and some PDFs that tried to maximize the layout by putting graphics in with very tiny margins. I can't find explicit sets fast enough, but I know I've had them. Generally, I could make cutfiles where I'd take pieces of the art from the pages of the original PDF and basically re-layout the product within Silhouette Studio. As a user, it is enough work that I tend not to bother. There are too many minis I have to cut that are easy to cut out.
Option 2: I've been starting to do a lot of Trash Mob Minis cutfiles. Those sets I'm working on don't have registration marks in the PDFs, but the margins are large enough that everything fits very nicely when brought into Silhouette Studio. It's easy for me to make cutfiles for these, and provide instructions to people about how to pull the graphics in.
Option 3: I've convinced a couple artists to start including registration marks in their products. They may not make cutfiles, and that's fine. For me (a guy who makes cutfiles for other people) it still feels like Option 2. But for everyone who uses my cutfiles, they simply have to print the PDF, load the printout into the cutter and go. Very simple.
Option 4: There are many artists who make their own cutfiles. Printable Heroes, Kev's Lounge, and even Squirmydad here provide cutfiles. Printable Heroes includes artwork *in the cutfiles* so you don't print the PDF. You lay out what you want, print from Silhouette Studio and cut it. Others include the reg marks in the PDF and provide cutfiles that are compatible with the printouts. I'm old and grumpy, and have run into cutfiles that I've just not been happy with. I'll try to list a couple things that bother me below, but in general, I personally don't use cutfiles I didn't make, because they generally don't follow the rules I've committed myself to.
Making your own cutfiles:
First, don't let Silhouette Studio trace things for you. They have a neat trace function. I use it for some craft projects, but you have to know what you're doing, and it generally makes messy cutfiles. You should be using the polyline tool to trace around each figure. Trace the top, lay down the middle scoreline if that's what you do, then mirror the top to the bottom, align it, connect the shapes, etc. I lay down straight polylines, then once I'm done with the top half, I select the points and smooth them as curves. Double-check that everything looks good before mirroring. After mirroring, double-check to make sure the front and back really do line up. If the don't, make the back half larger where necessary, and then mirror it to the top.
That's the first thing?!? What else?
Second, don't be crazy with the detail of your cuts. I mean, try to preserve as much detail as you can - bumps and wavy edges that follow a contour are fine. Lots of jagged bits, though, will yield ugly cuts and be difficult to edge.
Third, don't try to cut out TINY negative space. They can be a pain to pop out if they don't cut well, or clean up off the carrier sheet, and their a pain to edge. Once you're done assembling, you may not even notice the small circles you opted to cut out. Just be conscious of it. I don't have a hard-and-fast rule about sizes of cut shapes.
Fourth, be REALLY CAREFUL not to have single-point polylines in your file. I've seen some cutfiles people have tried to make, and the software does no favors with this. If you start a polyline and then try to cancel it, it may have created a single point in the document. These actually make the file size bigger, make interacting with the file slower, and can crash Silhouette Studio. It's never a bad idea to select regions of your cut lines and make sure you don't have stray marks creeping in.
Fifth... You know, I make a lot of these, and most of this becomes second nature... DOUBLE CHECK that you've assigned cut styles correctly. I've made this mistake with some of my cutfiles, and I'm not the only one. If you accidentally make a score line into a cut line, you're possibly going to ruin a whole page.
Sixth! I'm on a roll... Don't use dashed line styles to do perforations. Use a solid line and set its style to perforate. The cutter will only drag the blade where there's a line, so it's actually going to perforate the dashed parts, making weird, tiny perforations. I've also seen cases where the cutter really makes bad decisions on how to follow the lines while doing it's work, and it bounces back and forth between two dashed lines that are near each other. Knowing that the cutter only follows where the lines are drawn, don't go getting clever and use a dashed line set to cut to do a perforation. The typical dashed line is different than the typical perforated solid line, and (at least to me) it feels very different.
I'm sure there's more, but I've been typing for a long time now, and kinda want to do something else.
Shameless plug time! Paper Realms on PatreonI'm making cutfiles for stuff that doesn't have cutfiles. If you're an artist who is planning on selling minis, and you'd rather have someone else make cutfiles for you, you might want to consider my $5 tier. It's possible one of my patrons will ask for cutfiles for your stuff, and I'll make them. It's also possible that you'll get lost in the ocean of awesome minis from veteran mini makers. If you're in my $5 tier, you can request a specific cutfile set be made. I don't have a lot of patrons, but I do have a couple followers on social media, and I try to take photos of the minis I make cutfiles for. When I hit 10 patrons, I'll do more of that! So, for $5/month you might get a new set's cutfiles made AND some advertising to an audience interested in paper stuff. You'll have access to me via Discord, too, for chatting about paper related stuff. I'm considering a $10/month pledge that would be specifically for vendors that would like to shoot me something before it is released to get cutfiles available simultaneously. I don't expect many vendors would necessarily jump on that, but I'm open to the idea... I'd limit the number, because I'd hate to have a dozen new mini makers optimistically jump on that bandwagon and swamp me with requests!