Best Design Software Review For CNC Routers & Projects - Garrett Fromme

well hello my cnc brother or sister i am garrett with idc woodcraft and i'd really like to welcome you to this video especially if you are someone who is on the prowl to get yourself a cnc router and you've been doing your research as to which machine is right for you on your research journey you are also trying to figure out which design software you need to get if you're not you will be because you have to have design software in order to create the projects those amazing projects that are going to come out of your head and be carved out on your cnc router a lot of people are confused about that at this stage in the game so that's what this video is for it's here to teach you a little bit about the different cnc router design programs and what's good what's bad what you want to stay away from what you want to go towards what i'm going to be doing here is covering the top five design programs that most of us cnc router owners are using and i'm going to talk about the pros and cons of them we're going to discuss the subscription-based ones versus the ones you buy outright the free versus the paid and we're going to talk about online or web-based software versus offline the one that you outright own and have installed on your computer and we'll talk about the pros and cons of that and then we're going to dive into the pricing of these things i'm going to talk a little bit about why some are good why some aren't and by the time you're done with this video you will have a ton of clarity on this whole software picture i'm going to paint this whole picture at the end and show you how all this stacks up my scorecard and i'm going to give you my personal opinion as to what the best softwares are out there and what i use and why so without further ado we are going to dive into the computer and we're going to take this from the top and work our way down and by the time you're done you will know which software you need to get so let's get in the computer and get you learning about this software thing let's go [Music] all right we are on my computer and we are going to get into showing you about design software and what is the best one for you to get so the first thing i'm going to cover are the three variations that you can get software under first of all there is free versus paid design software for your cnc router next there's subscription based versus buying it outright and third there's online versus offline so i'm going to explain each one of these and my preference and i'm going to explain to you why i have my preference so first of all there's free versus paid now you know that you get what you pay for when you get free you don't get good quality and pretty much the same goes with design software free is nice it gives you a few tools to be able to create stuff but you become extremely limited in what you can do whereas when you pay for something you're generally paying for something that has a lot more flexibility and has a lot more power and that goes for design software for your cnc router as well so when it comes to free versus paid generally follow this rule free is very limited paid is flexible and powerful and allows you to get much more creative with your designs my preference is paid software the next one is subscription versus buy outright the difference is on a subscription you have a monthly bill and when you buy it outright you pay for the whole thing up front and it's all yours so here's the deal with subscriptions it's all fine and dandy until you forget to pay your bill when you forget to pay your bill you get cut off and you have no access to it until you get that fixed up and you get your subscription renewed or paid up to date whereas buy outright you don't have that problem you bought it it's yours and it's kind of like a car you know you can get a loan on it but if you don't pay your loan eventually they're going to come and take it away whereas if you bought the whole thing right up front nobody's going to come and take it it's yours until you either sell it or it dies so subscription is a monthly bill which you have to make sure you pay and i don't know if you're like me i don't want the responsibility of yet another bill on my plate so i prefer paying it outright where it's mine when you buy outright it belongs to you and you are done with it so my choice is buying it outright the third one is online versus offline now what this means is when it's online it's web-based the design software is actually being run from a computer that's outside of your home on a server somewhere offline is on your computer you have it right in front of you it's on your hard drive and you can work with it so the difference is two things if the server crashes then you and everybody else who's dependent on that to do their your cnc design work are now stopped in your tracks until they fix the server and the other thing is if if your internet goes down then you have no access to it and you're in the same boat you can't do anything until everything is fixed versus offline it is on your computer it's at your disposal all the time so online where you have no internet or the server crashes you are not designed in your projects when you're offline you have no restrictions so my preferences are i want paid software that is flexible and powerful i want to buy it outright and i want it to be offline and you'll find that is the best way to go so we've talked about free versus paid subscription versus buy outright online versus offline and this is very relevant and what we're about to talk about so there are a couple different variants we're going to talk about the free versus paid up front there are about five well-known softwares out there the designing software that you can work with with your cnc machine to do your design work the free ones are called carbide create and easel the paid ones is called vectric fusion 360 and carb cone so not that easel and carbide create are bad it's just you will find very quickly that you will be severely restricted in what you can do with your design work i get it if you're on a very very tight budget then you might want to go this route but i would indulge you to really consider the paid versions there are different paid levels for some of these things so you'll you'll learn about this and how you can actually get get better software for not as much money as you might think you might be paying okay so the first thing we're going to do is take a look at carbide create this is a free software i'm going to launch it right here and there it is i'm just going to do a quick comparison to the software my choice which is the vectric and i'm simply going to get it started here and now you can see this is all my design tools over here it looks a little complicated but it's not once you've learned about it okay so looking at this screen and then you look at this screen and there's a huge world of difference you can already tell that the free software has lots of limitations i mean you can do some pretty stuff like draw shapes let's see if i can find one uh let's just okay there's a rectangle um i can plug it in but it's kind of weird how i plug that in and there are some features where i can move it around and say i'm done see if there's just some features where i can mirror it i can rotate it but i don't have a lot of control over what's happening with this rectangle and i constantly have to go back in here to fix it so this is carbide create you can just see that it's very simple very very straightforward i'm going to type in text and immediately the text comes in huge that's not a big deal so just type in cnc and i'll just just apply the text let's make it a little smaller 0.25 and apply okay so there's my text pretty basic i can put other shapes in there and then i can start working with what they call tool paths where i actually dictate how this is going to get cut so this is carbide create so now we're going to go to easel and easel is a web-based design software so again remember if you become dependent on this program here diesel and you lose your internet connection or their cr server crashes you're you're locked out so an easel it's got a kind of a nice little layout here where you can do your design work on the left side and you can see your project forming on the right side and i'll show you what i mean i'm simply going to bring in some letters and i'm going to click in there and i'm going to type in cnc let's type in i love cnc so you can see it's actually showing me what it's going to look like right away which is nice you get immediate feedback from it and it's a little bit more powerful than the carbide create but it is a little more restricted in that you can't populate as many router bits into this so what i mean by that is there are quite a few different router bits that you will be getting you'll be getting various different v bits a 30 60 and a 90 degree and probably a 120 you're gonna have your down cutter bits don't worry i've got a video to explain router bits to you so just know that you're going to have a quite a variety of bits as you move along the easel variant does not allow you to populate a lot of bits now i just want to tell you the easel is put out by inventables that's the company that creates the x-carve cnc router and the carbide create is put out by shipoko cnc router the difference is carbide create you download onto your computer and when you compare it for its various categories it's basically an a buy outright type of thing on the free version so it's yours it's free so it's very limited and it's offline so in a way it has two green and one red the easel software is neither one of these you don't buy it nor do you subscribe so it's there's nothing really here to even worry about it's free so it's very limited and it's online no internet no designing so easel is completely off the table in my judgment as to his software to be using although i've heard reports of people saying they like the software so that is entirely up to you this is easel now with both the carbide create and easels you can go to what they call the pro version eso pro is a monthly subscription i believe we're going to click that there's a little button there and sign up for easel pro so you can either pay for your subscription at 155 or pay monthly 19.99 so that's quite a bit of savings if you go for for a year in that year you're going to find out how restricted you can be with the easel even in the pro version and same with carbide create carbureted create also has its pro version so we're going to go to the internet and i'm going to show you so carbide pre create pro 3d modeling and machining so i have not heard of a lot of people using the carbide create pro if you have then you can make a comment down below but let's take a look and see what it has so it says you can create 3d components and combine multiple 3d components so that's kind of cool you can create textures or apply textures and then load images 3d rough machining and 3d finish machining so engraving toolpath i don't know how powerful carbide create pro is i will say that it's 120 per year so that's a much better subscription license they have another one perpetual license if you pay 360. you will have a perpetual license it will never expire that's a little bit more powerful now look at the layout here it just doesn't have all the tools that i would want to see right up my disposal because there are a lot of things that you need to do and you'll see what i mean when we get to the paid version of software's let's go into our other softwares our paid software's the ones that we want to get to where we have all our flexibility to design what we want to design so there are three most popular ones there's vectric fusion 360 and carbco now i do want to say if you're relatively new to cnc routers and then the software and what have you fusion 360 is not for you we will put it this way here let me change that color a little bit more there we'll put it this way the vectric software in my opinion is the cadillac of the design softwares for your cnc router the fusion if you were to compare it with that is it is the space shuttle basically fusion is an engineering type of software it is really geared towards engineering as opposed to more the fun design work that we do as c and sears especially when you're getting into it so let's just take a quick look at fusion 360 and you'll see exactly what i'm talking about so we're going to hop over here so you can see simply by the image that fusion 360 is an intense program integrated cad cam cae and pcb software and right up front they tell you the pricing here now fusion 360 is meant more for manufacturing not for what we do when you're talking a 60 dollar subscription right up front at their lowest level then they have a 395 annually and then a three year subscription at 13 35. so i don't have a screenshot here of fusion 360. let's find one real quick let's dig one up fusion 360 images and i'll show you what i mean so here's this just shows the intensity of fusion 360. you can see you're doing some pretty heavy duty work with fusion 360. and you can see all these menus over here it's quite a complex program so i'm going to suggest that you not start with fusion 360. wait until you become an engineer all right so let's talk about carveco a little bit now carvco is a good program and it's been around for a while it's just not well known but quite a few cnc users use it and this pricing structure is a little bit better and so is its user friendliness so we're going to go over and take a look at carve code now they've got several different versions there's the carvco maker that's your basic 2d vcard type of thing where you you have good capability there's the carveco maker plus where you're starting to get into some 3d modeling which is very cool and then the full-blown carveco which is getting into your engineering level so let's look at carveco maker and so here's an image screenshot of it right here and you can see it it does a pretty good job you do some pretty cool things with carveco and let's just kind of scroll down the interface on the screen is pretty much user friendly it almost feels like it's kind of a fun layout they've got a very long page here it can handle lots of different file types and bitmap types it can pick up relief models i want to see what types surface mesh so that should probably be 3d stuff so i can pick up some 3d stuff so you looks like you can import 3d models into it there you go and work with them a little bit here's an example of a 3d model where you can import it in and then you can start creating some projects out of it and it comes with some models too and those are actually some pretty cool models i kind of like it i've seen some creators make some of these the warthog i love that plane all right so let's just come on down oh it does tool path as well i'll talk about that in a little bit because that's very important and let's just come on down to the pricing strategy that's how our tool library database is set up very similar to vectric which is the next one we'll talk about it is simulation on it and so let's just kind of come on down get to the bottom of this thing okay 15 per month that's the subscription rate for that and i'm going to guess that you can probably pay a yearly fee yes so it's 180 per year that's actually a pretty good price so it's carvco is a good software want to balance it out again when your subscription runs out if you didn't remember you're going to be cut off at some point all right so that's the carveco maker the basic level then they have the carveco maker plus which is what we're looking at right now where you can start to create 3d models something like this wolf here so it's got all the other same stuff where you can do your design work and generate your tool path like that but you're creating 3d models as well so the price of that if we get all the way down the bottom 50 per month 600 a year license and perpetual license is twelve hundred dollars so if you're going to get carve co i would suggest that you just buy the twelve hundred dollar perpetual license and be done with it that way you don't have to worry about a subscription now quickly i'm just going to cover carveco the main full dog full-blown software so it does all that stuff you can do a lot more 3d modeling and you can create your own 3d models and i'm not sure what the cost is on that let's take a look okay it doesn't have a cost on that so i'm guessing there's there's a little bit more expense to that anyway let's go back to the home page and see if it says something gosh coming up okay so that's for manufacturing so you don't really need the full blown carb coat version so unless you're getting the cabinets and and things like that so what i would recommend if you choose to go with carveco i would go with maker plus and get perpetual license and be done with it and you'll be in good shape one of the drawbacks of carveco is that there are not a lot of videos out here that are well done to help you as a cnc beginner design your amazing projects and get it out on our long mill cnc router or whatever router you use or are going to get so you may want to take that into consideration on the other hand there are a lot of good videos out here on the vectric software there are three uh youtubers that do a really good job to teach you one is mike mazelik and he teaches how to do the 3d modeling stuff the more advanced stuff there's mark lindsey he teaches you all the step-by-step stuff in the design software and then i've been told that i am one where i literally take you step by step through the entire process from your design out to our cnc router so with that if you want to learn this stuff then you may want to subscribe to this channel and those guys channels as well i'll have links down below for them at this point if you feel like i'm giving you some clarity on what's good and what's bad when it comes to design software and really the things you want to stay away from then give me a thumbs up and maybe a comment down below and if you're getting ready to dive into the cnc router world and really don't know what to do subscribe to this channel because i really do break it down for you in step-by-step videos in the design and i teach you all about the cnc router down below are a bunch of links that will help you along your cnc journey and there's a pdf download where i've organized all my videos so that it literally takes you up the ladder so you'll want to download that all right so what we're going to get into now is the vectric software my software of choice and you're going to learn exactly why here where i'm actually going to dive into it a little bit and demonstrate it and then i'll wrap this up with a nice little bow at the end and you'll have a lot of clarity from that point and you'll know exactly what you need to be getting so let's get into the vectric software and start learning about that first thing we're going to do is go to their website and we're going to look at the five different packages that they have now before you get into the packages you're going to notice that they use the term desktop in their names and the term pro so desktop means that the software is only limited to allowing you to create a project on a 24 inch by 24 inch space so if your cnc machine has a workspace of 24 inches square or smaller then the desktop versions are what you want to go for if you want to go larger because you have a larger working space on your cnc router then you want to go with the pro features let me show you like this in real space so you see this carving of an eagle says proud american with some stars on it that is a 24 inch by 24 inch project actually quite large however i found pretty quickly as most cnc's do that even 24 by 24 is restricted in size now when we look at our long mill here i have a much larger cutting space it's even bigger than the black that you see there that's just my spoil board and so in order to be able to take advantage of this machine's workspace i need to get the pro version or you will need to get the pro version if you get a bigger than 24 by 24 machine which i totally recommend that you do so now you know the difference between desktop and pro the desktop version will only allow you to do 24 inches by 24 inches pro will let you go unlimited it doesn't matter how big the machine is all right let's just keep going in the vectric software they have this one variant called cut 2d and there's two two types of packages there's the desktop and the pro so cut 2d is somewhat limited in that it only allows you to cut 2d projects for example you see this little wing that they have over here the rings the wingspar you can't do like 3d type of features or what they call v carbon which is like the most coolest thing in the world let me explain the cut 2d this way so we have a cool little beginner's project right here a house number sign and this has raised numbers on it that goes down to another level and erased border all the way around it that is what cut 2d can do the cut 2d can also do very cool signs like this harley davidson sign where all the letters and details are carved down into a slot and the cut 2d can carve out the shape of the sign so you can do some pretty cool stuff with the cut 2d even this love my lawn mill what you cannot do on cut 2d are things like this where you can really take advantage of this type of font creating swirls like this that start off really thin they get fatter and then they get thin again and fatter same thing with up here or like this the cut 2d cannot do this with this kind of detail with all the sharpness that you see right here and the ends of the lines main so let me show you what i mean by that so you see there's a channel or v-groove that goes all the way through here that's called v-carving and that's how you can get these lines that go from thin to thick and out to thin again the other thing you cannot do in cut 2d is cut out stars at least you can't make them look really cool here's another example you see this is channeled out it gets fat gets thin again the other thing you can't do with the cut 2d are inlays i mean you can but it takes a lot of finagling and i don't like to do that kind of work but isn't that awesome i did this feather i did a video about this by the way it teaches you how to do this so there will be a link down below for that video as well you need to use the the next feature i'm going to be talking about the v carving feature of vectric which is the next level up same thing with something like this this super fine detail doily or whatever you want to call it but let's just show you how fine we get here this is all called a v carve and it's done with a very fine 30 degree v-bit with a blade on it that's actually all i like to use are the bladed v bits whenever possible there's another one there's links for all this stuff down below in the description so now you understand what cut 2d does you can actually cut multiple planes at different levels and you can make some pretty cool stuff like the house number sign or the harley-davidson sign what cut 2d cannot do is make details like this line here where it goes thin it goes thick and goes thin again all in one kind of cut or up sizing it to carves this big where it goes down really thin down here at the bottom and comes out very wide that is what we call v carving and that's what i'm going to be showing you next the next level of the vectric software and the one that i absolutely recommend that you get so we're going to dive back into the computer and i'm going to show you vectric v-carve let's go so cut 2-d allows you to cut at depths specific depths on planes they have the 2d pro here the one thing that 2d will not do will not carve 3d models like this that's a 3d carve not on a very good piece of oak but you see it's got a lot of texture on it it's done with a what they call a tapered ball nose bit that does really fine detail carving you zoom in and you see this line's made there's a lot of bumps on it and what have you and you can even see the teeth and the nostril your cut 2d cannot do this so if you want to get into some really cool carving with the 3d stuff then you want to make sure not to get the cut 2d unless it's just because of budget what you want to do is get into the v carving products so if you look at this sign right here it's a little more detailed it's got some kind of cool depth features a little kind of v-shape in there what v-carve has that cut 2d doesn't is v-carving but it also allows you to carve out the 3d models you can't make 3d models but you can import them and carve them so that's a nice cool feature with the v-carve i always recommend you start with the v-carve again they have the desktop version and they have the pro version if your machine is 24 inches by 24 inches or less get the desktop version if its cut space is larger than 24 then get the pro version the last version they have which is their flagship their premium software's the aspire so this does everything that the 2d does and the v-carving does but it also allows you to create the 3d models that you're going to carve which is a very cool feature uh that's a different skill set the guy was telling you about mike mazelick you want to watch his channel so now that you know we're going to dive into the vectric and take a look around i just want to tell you i do not have the aspire version i have vcarve pro now vcarve pro and vcarve desktop they're pretty much the same thing the good thing is is no matter what version you're looking at the stuff i'm going to talk to you about now is pretty much the same in all the software variants i will make distinctions when they are different so let's open up the vcarve yeah i love my long mill i do i did a lot of research on cnc routers before i got the long mil cnc router so if you're still in the market for a cnc router and you want to just see a really deep dive into how they're put together and what to look for and what to stay away from there are two videos down below one is uh how to avoid making a bad purchase which i see way too many people do and then is a deep dive review on the long mill that tells you about what you need to be looking for in a machine okay so let's dive into vectric vcarve pro it's this little icon right here it pops up and that's our opening screen and once i create a file or a project that i'm going to start working on which i'm just doing there and you see there it is and i've got a lot of features over here which make it uh very flexible that i can do a lot of different things now i want to try to show you what i mean by that we're going to go back to carbide create and look how plain this is it's a freebie and so you're just not going to have the power behind that to manipulate things the way you want to as you would in the vcarve and the same would go with the easel software so now we're back in the vector soft bar so the first thing i want to point out to you is what the difference is between the cut 2d and the v-curve is and why you want to go with the v-carb so i'm going to go over to another vector i already have launched and so you can see i've got two identical signs with some cool font on it i love my long mil cnc router and you can see this font is kind of wild it's got its own unique character lots of curves and swirls around and you're about to see why or how cut 2d is so limited so i'm going to go over to create what they call tool paths and i'm going to create a tool path for both the vcarve and what the cut2d will do now tool path is how i set up and dictate how the cnc router is going to run out the project so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select this text right up at top and i'm going to run a tool path called pocketing which this is what you'd be using in your cut 2d in order to get this done and i'm going to use a very small bit in this pocket i am going to use a 1 16 diameter bit it's an end mill very small and what it's going to do what i'm telling it to do is carve out inside these letters so it looks all very cool and so i'm going to set that up let me just check my depths my settings good and i'm going to calculate that out and i'm going to change the color of it and i'm going to actually generate that and now you can see right here nope i have to redo it so you see right here i love my lawnmill cnc and you see how much was missed that's because the bit could not get into these smaller areas of the letter let me split the screen for a minute it could not fit into these little small areas right here or over here and these areas right there and so the machine and the program actually literally would not write the program to cut it here's the difference this is what v carving is so we're going to close this i'm going to go back over here and i'm going to select the second one and i'm going to run a v carb it's a different button right up here that you will not find in the 2d cut i select that and i have a v bit it's what they call a 60 degree v bit and that's all i have to do is tell what bit i want to use the b bit by the way is shaped like a v i'm going to calculate it and i'm going to give it color and i'm going to run it same exact font and now you can see the difference whereas the lower one with the v-carve software was able to carve out the entire word using the v-carving feature let's see if we get up close it doesn't really show up well because of my graphics but you can see it's cut in it goes wide it goes small it actually looks like the text it looks kind of cool cut 2d does this so i just wanted to get this really clear to you that cut 2d is probably not the way you want to go i've got a little bit more that i want to show you about the vectric software and what the difference is between the quality softwares and the freebies so just stick around at this point i just want you to like just get the idea of what the difference is between cheap software and good quality software and like fusion 360 software that'll be way over your head so i just want to ask you again if you feel like this video is starting to give you some clarity about software as far as the design software then give me a thumbs up and if you decide to get the vectric software i do have what they call an affiliate link that means that if you click that link and you buy it i get a little bit of pocket change helps me out a little bit so that link would be down below and in the pdf that will be provided as well so just to ask you to use the link if that's okay with you all right so we're gonna get back into this and i'm gonna show you a few more features in the vectric software that you just don't find in some of the other softwares and we'll talk about aspire a little bit more too so let's go now just before we get back into the vector can i show you some of these more powerful features that you want in this design software i did want to give you a summary in case you got enough information already to make a decision let's just run through this i created a little spreadsheet and i've got all the software's listed here that we've talked about easel carbide create the two pro versions of each and then we've talked about fusion 360 carveco maker plus and vectric so the first thing is the overall grading so i created this little table here of the free versus paid subscription versus own and online versus offline so anyone that i feel is going to be some challenges with got a red so free got red subscription got read and online a web base got red so every one of them fell into the red with the exception of the vectric and that was one of the criterias that i ultimately picked it on i absolutely tried to stay away from the subscription models because i just don't like having a bill i've already told you that though okay and it's online and it's all paid it's all mine and we got one other thing i just want to talk about a few pros and cons of each one and then we're going to grade everything together so easel and easel it's pro is it gives you feedback when you're doing your design meaning you do something on your design screen it shows right up on the project piece that you can see on the other side of the screen the con is it has lack of tools and you can't put a lot of bits into the database carbide create a pro is this very simple layout if you were really challenged really really challenged with computers then maybe that's the way to start it also has lack of tools that would be a con as far as diesel pro it's still a simple platform and it has more tools i can't give it a con because i don't know i haven't been on it same with carbide create but the cool pro thing with carbide create pro is as the 3d capability fusion 360 it's pro as it is loaded with tools you got so much power with that you can launch a space shuttle however it's con it is way too complex don't dive in if you don't want complexity all right carveco maker plus has a nice easy layout their pro their con is their terminology sometimes tends to be a little bit off from what normal cnc speak would be when it comes to doing your design work so that makes you just stop and guess for a minute are they really saying what i think they're saying okay and then vectric as pros has got many ways to work with your stuff very flexible one of those cons is some of the buttons are inconvenient you have to scroll down to get to a button and when you have to do that over and over again it gets a little bit old all right so i took everything that i could think of and i graded it on price ease of use how many users there were how many tutorials there are the quality of the software and then i took the three things i talked about free versus paid subscription versus ownership and online versus offline i graded everything so for price i gave it three levels if it's really inexpensive that got a good price a good number so the east one carbide won out on that one carveco and vectric were mid-range and fusion is very expensive ease of use the two that got ease of use is carbide create and carbide pro as far as many users the majority of people are using easel or the vectric software tutorial wise vectric i think has the most tutorials out there that are of the best quality so you will have the best cnc guidance with the vectric on that one the quality of the software it always goes to the paid softwares and then finally when it came to the three that i was talking about before they either got a zero or a one so free is zero paid is one subscription model is zero ownership is one and online versus offline online is zero off minus one and so the only two that came out on that was carveco and vetric so i just wanted to give you that little wrap up if you don't want to see some of the more powerful tools that you get in the vectric then then at least we'll have that i would appreciate if you would use the links that i have down in the description if you choose to go with the car of co-maker or the vectric all right let's get on with getting back into the vectric so i can show you some more of these tools now there's one more thing about the vectric software that i want to let you know about that you will want to know about that takes it over the top for me one is they have a laser add-on module now that laser add-on module allows you to run your laser so you can run it different power and that module works with the 2d all the way on up through all their carving softwares the other one that you will really want to know about you will probably want to use is the photo carve now that is or can be purchased as a standalone type of item or it will integrate with your vectric v carve and the aspire version these are two really cool ones especially the photo carving i mean that's where you just take an image a photo and it does virtually all the work you have to do some settings but they come out really really really cool go into some of the facebook groups you'll see what i mean so that's why the vectric has just gone over the top with me because they've got a lot of things they've been doing this for a long time they just keep adding on to what they have and making it really user friendly for the cnc now i want to show you the other features that you can work with in the vcarve that you can't work in with the cut 2d i'm going back to my 2d screen here you see i've got a couple of things here and i click on it it's an eagle's head and you see it's got some pretty cool definition this is a 3d model and so in the v-carve we can bring these 3d models in and actually do carving on them i'm going to demonstrate this and you cannot do this in the cut 2d so i'm going to select that i'm going to actually carve that horse out so i just have to select the right bit and i'm just going to go with the one that i have here i'm going to set up my tool and i'm set up and we're going to calculate out and i so it's going to do them both and we're going to actually preview that and that is your 3d carve so that is definitely much better than the cut 2d now what's the difference with a spire versus the v-carve well we're going to switch back over to here in aspire you can actually build these models and then you can import them into the the design software aspect this being the designs aspect over here and then you can generate the tool paths to create these really really cool projects right there so i'm going to come back and i'm just going to show you some of the cool things we can do on this so i'm just going to move these guys out of the way and why this this is so much more powerful than the freebies i'm going to draw a rectangle and let's see if we can fiddle with the rectangle i am going to draw a an arc right there and i'll draw another arc right there and let's see if we can do this and now i'm going to grab the triangle and i'm going to grab the arc and the other arc and i'm going to twist it all up let's see if we can get this twisted just like that so that's how quick you can do things like this i'm just going to show you a very quick example of how we can make a sign in no time flat so i'm going to delete that i'm going to close this and then we're going to get out of this i am going to just delete that and let's just pull that over there watch this how fast you can create something i'm going to get a rectangle i'm going to put it there i'm going to close that i'm going to get a circle and we'll put it right there i'm going to modify everything quickly so put a radius let me set up my parameters one so put one on a radius here here here we're going to do some trimming there there close and then i can take the eagle's head i can run it up into here make it a little bit smaller and i can put in some cool font i'll just say eagles landing and i can even turn the font there's so many different things i can do with this font if i wanted to it's it's very cool what we can do and now let's just carve this out here let's let's add a little feature to this we're going to just change this and i'm going to offset that but that much there we go so i just created another line there and watch this watch how fast i create this project so we are going to i'm going to delete the tool paths that i just created i'm going to create some new tool paths i'm going to select what they call a profile and we'll use we'll just go with that what i have in here uh 0.05 so what i'm doing is really quickly i'm just setting this guy up cut that we're gonna reset that i gotta split my screens don't worry i teach you how to do all this stuff then we're gonna grab that font we're gonna close that and we are going to recarve it like we did before and now that's done and now i'm going to do the eagle's head we will just carve that out i am doing this quickly i'm not doing it totally so everything's like taken care of but and then i'm gonna cut out the sun the thing is that this is how fast we can do this i'm just picking the right router bit that i want to do this with it says cut it all the way through so i tell it to do that and then we preview all the tool paths and so in a matter of five minutes i just made a little sign eagle's landing with the eagle head engraved in it of course we can modify it quite a bit and we got that little accent around the boundary there so this is how powerful and quickly you can work with the vectric software now there's one other thing i want to explain to you about why the vectric software is powerful now carve code does this fusion 360 does this they all do this in a certain way it's called cam or computer-aided machining which is what we just did by creating these tool paths to create this sign that looks like that but some design softwares don't have cam in it and sometimes people use those and then they import their drawings into something else that has cam in it and then they process it it's lots of extra steps what's so nice about vectric is you have design features over here which i only showed you an inkling of them now there's a star i could create and it also has the cam feature where you can set it up to dictate how it's going to create your projects just like that and then you can tell it to post process these tool paths what post process means is it's going to write the code what they call g-code that will tell your cnc router what to do you don't have to know g-code the whole system set up so that all you have to do is transfer the g-code to another piece of software which you have to have something that looks like this it'll come up the control software that actually controls your cnc router that will be for another video just know that this is about the design software and to give you clarity on what design software you want to get for your cnc router one of the things that i get asked all the time is will this software work with my cnc router design software the actual design area where you're drawing the lines and circles and squares to come up with the amazing project that's coming out of your head that has nothing to do with the router so the design software is going to work for you whether you're doing a router laser plasma cutter nylon cutter on and on it's when you get to the cam side the cam side needs to be geared towards cnc routers and all the softwares i've talked about are so with that being said to just bring it all down the vectric is the only one that has met my criteria we talked about the paid versus free i don't want free because i know free doesn't have the stuff that i want my daddy always taught me if you want something get the good one we get the subscription versus buy overnight buy outright and i would rather own my software rather than have a bill that i could potentially forget to pay and finally we got the web-based or online versus offline web-based meaning you have to have an internet connection to connect to the the software whereas if you're offline it's on your hard drive on your computer i want to own my stuff vectric is the only one that has met all that criteria and that's why i'm a vector guy and it's just great software it's got a lot of flexibility you can do so many things with it so i want to remind you if you feel as such that you want the vectric software and you're okay with it use the affiliate link down below and that way i'll get some pocket change and i would certainly appreciate it so with all that i'm garrett with idc woodcraft give me a thumbs up and a comment and subscribe and i will talk to you next time

Channel: CNC Routers, Beginners & Beyond - Garrett Fromme

Views: 9,047

Keywords: cnc for beginners, cnc router, design software for cnc routers, best design software cnc router, cnc router design software, best cnc router design software, cnc router review, cnc design software review, fusion 360, cnc software, vectric aspire, vcarve pro, cnc router software, cnc router software free, best cnc router software, cnc router software for beginners, free cnc software, Vectric, Vcarve, Carveco, Carveco maker, Easel, carbide create, cnc software routers

Id: u1O6u5DITSo

Length: 56min 25sec (3385 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021