designing for rounded objects?

[MastersAtticEtching]

Let me start by saying I'm new to Illustrator and there's a lot I don't know.

I'm using Illustrator to design for laser etching on glasses (wine glasses mostly).  The glasses themselves are both round and tapered (the top of the glass as a smaller circumference than the bottom of the etchable surface).  I've been making my art board where the height = the maximum etchable surface and the width = the biggest circumference of the glass), but trying to etch a design created on a flat rectangle on a not flat, non rectangular surface leads to warping and sometimes overlap on the image.  Is there a way to mimic the dimensions of the glass so that the design looks more approximately as it was designed when it's placed on the surface of the glass?

I appreciate your help in advance.

[Monika Gause]

Do you etch them yourself or does a service provider do that for you?

If the latter, ask them how you should provide the artwork.

[MastersAtticEtching]

I do it myself - it's not problematic for small designs but I'm wanting to do some designs that wrap all the way around the glass.

[Monika Gause]

Then how do you use the design? Send it to your laser engraving machine?

Can you please details how that works and what kind of template you need?

With a conical glas you could apply an envelope distort. You will need to calculate the distortion.

I'm wondering if there is a function in the driver Laser engraving round, cylindrical and conical objects

[MastersAtticEtching]

So I make the design in Illustrator, export as a .png, import the .png into the laser machine's software (RDWorks), and then output from that software to the laser machine - not unlike how you would send something to a conventional printer.

Envelope sounds like a good start - and something I know nothing about.  I'll do some googling on that.

Thanks for your help so far

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

It's something that sometimes packaging designers need:

Curved Dielines & Warping Tutorial - Part 1 | TUCKYHUT

[MastersAtticEtching]

That looks awesome - thank you so much!