How to Quickly Import into LightBurn from SolidWorks

The laser cutting dilemma. You’ve created a wonderfully detailed model in SolidWorks, but you need to move it into LightBurn in order to cut it. Unfortunately, it’s so many parts that it’s going to take forever to save each part individually and then import them into your LightBurn file. In this post, I’ll show you there’s nothing to fear and you’ll be cutting in no time.

Saving Multiple Parts in a SolidWorks Assembly

In this post I’m going to be using one of my files to better illustrate the couple of quick steps that will regularly save you lots of time during your development process. Here I have a little coaster that I’ve made with three parts. The top and bottom are the same design and the middle is a different design:

In order to move this three layered design to LightBurn I will have to move two separate files into LightBurn, the “base” and “middle” file. To do so, I select both faces of the base and middle part that I would like to cut and they should highlight blue as shown:

Next, is to click the down arrow next to the floppy disk in the top toolbar to bring up the save options and select “Save as New.” Under the “Save as type:” selection click the down arrow and choose Dxf. Choose the location and file name you would like to save it as and select Save. I’ve saved mine named as “Combined”. This will bring up the side menu for the DXF/DWG Output. The Export setting should be “Faces/loops/edges” and it should already have the faces highlighted under the “Entities To Export.” If they aren’t correct, reselect the correct faces in order to have the desired correct output. Under the “Export Options” select “Separate Files” and then the green check mark.

This will bring up a cleanup pop-up window. Here you can verify that the correct entities are being saved correctly. You can scroll through the entities by selecting the arrows in the upper tool bar. Validate that the saved files are correct and then click Save at the bottom.

If you navigate to the location on your computer where you saved the files you will see the .dxf files saved with names as the name of the file and whatever entity number it is. For example, for me it would be “Combined (Entity_0)” as the base and “Combined (Entity_1)” as the middle part. All that’s left to do is move the .dxf files into LightBurn.

Importing the Files into LightBurn

Importing the final .dxf files into LightBurn is a simple process. In LightBurn, click on File -> Import and then select the files you would like to move into LightBurn. Something to keep in mind is that if multiple files are selected at once they will overlap at the import origin point like shown:

If you’re going to be importing several files, I’d recommend doing one at a time so that it’s a little easier to see what is being moved into the workspace. From there it’s determining how many pieces to import or copy and paste to get the correct amount of parts that need to be cut.

I hope this post will make life easier moving files between SolidWorks and LightBurn and that you learned something along the way!

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