The Universal Depth Recipe: Four Sublayers for All Metals

One saved layer, four sublayers, and it covers fill and relief engraving on essentially every metal, only the line interval changes per material. Build it once in Lightburn, save it to the Material Library, and never delete a sublayer: toggle output per job instead. Numbers below are starting points for a 60W JPT MOPA-class source; re-grid them on your machine.

The four sublayers

All four are Fill mode, never Line. Each has one job:

• Depth does the removal. 1800-2400 speed and 65-85% power land in the same place on most parts, the 2100/75 center is just a dependable anchor.
• Clean is the same energy at a different angle pair, it erases the Depth layer's scan texture each cycle.
• Polish is a light, fast, high-frequency kiss that brightens the floor. Everything gets polish.
• Darkening is an ultra-dense, slow, single-direction pass, it's line density (about 6000 lines per inch) that burns the metal's nickel content black, not power. It's the one metal sublayer that runs all-shapes-at-once, and it runs on selected elements only (text, accents), not the whole engrave. See Darkening & Finishing for which metals can take it.
• Note the angle discipline on sublayers 1 and 2: even scan angle, odd increment (20/7, 10/13), so repeated cycles never re-hit the same angle. See Fill Modes & Hatch Patterns.

Run order

1. Depth + Clean together on Repeat (run-screen repeat count) until you reach target depth.
2. Polish ×1 over everything.
3. Darkening ×1 on the selected elements only. Run it once, and reset the counter first.

• Use the run screen's Repeat, not the layer's Passes field, for this recipe. Repeat cycles the Depth+Clean pair as intended; the Passes field repeats a single sublayer and breaks the alternating-angle rhythm. (3D Sliced work is the opposite, see the relief module.)
• Reset the count before every job. A leftover repeat count from the last job is a classic way to double-burn a finished part.
• Deep 1-2mm work: 35-60 repeat cycles, and refocus about halfway down, the beam goes weak as the floor drops away from focus.
• Thin brass variant: sublayers 3+4 off, power down to ~65%, roughly 6 passes. Thin stock warps if you run the full recipe at full energy.

Adapting it per metal

The recipe transfers across metals with ONE change: the line interval, per the by-material chart in Fill Modes & Hatch Patterns (0.02 for titanium/carbon steel/tungsten, 0.03 for brass/copper/aluminum and most everything else, 0.05 for thin shallow work). Speed, power, and frequency stay put.