How to Break Apart a Circle in Lightburn

In this Lightburn tutorial, you will learn how to Break Apart a Circle in Lightburn and then break it up into segments.

Why would I want to break a circle apart in Lightburn?

There are a number of reasons that you may want to create a circle and then break it up into segments in Lightburn:

• You might want to create a perfect semi circle.
• You might want to create quarters or Pizza shapes etc
• You might want to break an oval or a circle into two pieces as the whole design may be too large for your particular laser, and you need to engrave it in two or more pieces.
• You might want to create a pie chart and be able to separate the pieces out.

Firstly, we start by clicking on the Ellipse tool, and I’m going to hold the shift key down and then click and drag with my mouse to draw the circle.

It’s important that you hold that shift key if you want a perfect circle. If you don’t, you are going to get more of an oval shape (which is fine if that is what you are after). However, for our purposes, we want it to be perfectly round.

So, make sure to hold down the shift key while you draw that circle.

Click on the ‘Select Tool’.

Now, you want to right-click on the circle. From the pop-up that appears select the ‘Convert to Path’ option. As the name suggests, this converts the shape into a Path which then allows us to make edits to the shape.

Now that it’s a Path, come up to the Arrange option up on the top menu bar. Click on that, and come down and click on ‘Break Apart’.

While the Select tool is selected, come back to your circle, and you can click on each segment and drag them out from the circle.

You can see in the image below that we’ve broken it apart into four segments, but what if you want to break it up into more segments?

Well, you are in luck… just scroll down for the super exciting steps on how to break up your circle even more.

How to Create More Segments

If you want to create more segments, this is what you need to do.

Start by creating your circle as we did before and convert it to a Path.

Here’s a quick reminder of those steps:

• Click on the Ellipse tool, hold down the shift key and drag to draw your circle.
• Select the Select tool, right-click on the circle and select Convert to a Path.

Once your circle has been converted to a Path, go to the Edit Nodes option from the left-hand menu options and click on it.

You’ll also notice that when you hover your mouse over this option, a pop-up appears.

If we take a look at this pop-up in more detail, you can see that includes a number of options. Each of those options has a letter in front of it. You don’t actually click on these options to use them, it is simply just a list of what you can use to make changes.

In our case, we want the ‘Insert Node Point’ option which corresponds to the letter ‘I’.

So just remember that letter ‘I’ because we are going to need it further on. Don’t get too stressed though…if you do forget, you can always come back and hover over the Edit Nodes option to get the list to appear again.

So, you’ve clicked on the Edit Nodes option and you’ve remembered the letter ‘I’ and now you just need to come back to your circle and click on it.

You’ll notice that as you do that, that here are already four nodes showing, and that’s why when we did the last circle, we were able to break it up into four segments because there were four nodes.

Now we need to add more nodes in order to get more segments. And the way to do that is just to hover between the two nodes to find the middle point. You don’t have to guess about finding the middle point because when you hover your mouse over near to the center, you will see that it changes from an arrow to a circle with a line through it.

Now, all you have to do is just press the “I” key on your keyboard. You don’t have to click with your mouse or anything; you just have to hover over it to get to that point and then press “I” on your keyboard.

Now you can see now we have a new node point.

Do the same on the other 3 segments; hover over each one and press “I” on your keyboard.

You can see the result in the image below.

Now that I have all those node points all I need to do now is come up to the ‘Arrange’ option in the top menu and come down to ‘Break Apart’.

We now select the Select Tool, and we can just drag those segments out. You can see we’ve got all these new segments now. And you can do that as many times as you like, assuming that you’ll be able to insert those nodes. I’m not sure what the maximum is, but as long as you can insert a node, you’ll be able to break the circle apart into smaller segments.

Conclusion

And there you have it. You can see how easy this is to break apart a circle in Lightburn.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re working on laser engraving projects, artistic designs, or intricate shapes, I’m sure you will find this technique helpful and we hope it encourages you to explore the creative capabilities of Lightburn software.