Carveco Maker Project: V-Carving Images

hello and welcome to this tutorial for carve cope maker my name is Leighton and I'm going to be showing you how to create some more advanced VB carving I'm going to take an image and I'm going to trace around that and then we're going to machine it pretty sure that I'm going to have a few problems along the way with the image because it's quite detailed I'll show you how you can get around that and we're going to pretty much create our own sort of design from this okay so this is the finished piece and I'm going to be producing right so to start off I'm just going to close this model and I'm going to bring in an image and I'll show you how you can trace around the image to save a lot of work and there are a couple of ways that you can import images one way is to go over to open and then just select the image another way is to just grab the image and drag and drop it into cargo maker so if I thought click on this image this is what I have and I'd like to trace around this if I were to try to copy this manually it would take me a very long time so I'll show you how to use a tool that will automatically do this for us so if I close that and I'm just going to drag and drop that into cargo maker okay so when I drag and drop it's in there it will automatically ask me to set the model size so here you can see the height and the width now this is the height and the width that the image was created if I were to change one of these sizes let's say if I were to make that 3000 you can see that the width also changes that's because it's locking the aspect ratio so it won't skew the image now if I wanted to I could do this in inches so let's say the height of this is let's say three foot 36 inches okay so you also need to set the origin so you can set that to be the bottom left the top left top right bottom right or the center I'm going to set it to be the bottom left and then select okay now what this will do it will place you within the 3d view but for this image it's given me this message so this isn't nothing to worry about this message is just basically telling me but I can only use 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in carve comb maker but this image is quite a high-resolution image so it's just telling me that it's reduced the resolution of it just so I can use it so I wouldn't worry about that too much so it's okay and you can see that it's opened up my image now it's placed me in the 3d view need to work on images my personal preference is to actually use the 2d view the reason being is that when you're looking at the top then view within the 3d view you get a little shiny area in the center and I just personally would rather use the 2d view because I feel that the images just look better so what I'm going to do switch to the 2d view and you can make up your own mind so there you can see the 2d view so see how the image is a lot more crisper and I can see it's a little bit better it's just my own personal preference to use the 2d view to do this so if we zoom in let's say on this head here and take a look at these now you can see that some of the lines here are quite jagged so what we going to do is to try surroundings and the tool won't follow all of these jagged areas it will basically create a smooth transition between them so if i zoom out and i'll show you how to trice around this first of all so the tool that we use to do this is called big Maps event at all that's located on the top toolbar here big nuts are better so if I click on that it opens up the bitmaps effect at all on the top right there the first option in the list of this dialog is to reduce the colors now that's really really important because if you don't do that but the way that this tool works is that it needs to use one color to trice around now at the moment it's using this black color but as you can see there in the bottom there are a lot of different shades of black within this image if I click on the arrow going down you can see I've got some Gray's as well and then it's going into white so there are actually 256 colors still within this image even though it just looks like a black and white image okay so if I were to just create the vectors name what would happen is it wouldn't give me a very good results so if ever you get this sort of result then you probably have introduced the colors within the image so if i zoom in on this head here and there's a slider bar here this is called the contrast slider bar what this does it basically fades out the image so if I just left-click and bring that down and you're slowly fade out the image and you can see that the results isn't very good and I wouldn't really want to use this because it wouldn't work okay so what I'm going to do is delete all of those so just move that over there are quite a lot of vectors in this image so it's slowing down my computer a little bit so if I want to select all of these vectors really quickly a shortcut for that is to press ctrl on the keyboard and then select a and that will select everything and then I can just press Delete okay so let me bring up the contrast so you can see it so this time I'm going to do this a little bit differently so what I'm going to do is reduce the colors so if I select reduce colors I'll just move this out of the way and it says that the current number of colors in the image is 255 the new maximum number of colors is 32 so it's already brought this down to 32 colors as you can see there in the bottom now if I grab this and bring aids further down you can see that it's reduced it's a 7 colors then what this is doing it's blending colors into each other ok so because this is a black and white image I can bring this right the way down to two colors so I've just got black and white color images are a little different you may need to bring color back into it okay so if I select apply I've just got then the bottom left black and white in this image so if I were to create the vectors now and then zoom in on the head you can see he gives me much better vetters okay and I can machine these now you can also see that there are random areas where it hasn't created a vector so maybe here you can also see that it's created these vectors here now if I did want to create vectors of rounds any of these areas that's all controlled by something called the speckle size so if I were to undo these and then change the speckle size to one and then create vectors you can see that it's now created a vector around this area here that's because the speckle sighs acts as a pixel tolerance so what this is doing is anything under one pixel it won't create a vector around so if I were to undo that and then change that to let's say zero create vectors it's going to create events are around all of the pixels okay so that's how it's created the fences around these random pixels here now I'm not too fussed about having vectors around these small pixels so what I'm going to do is proceed back to the default value and then smoothness is basically how to move that the vectors are going to be so the lower let's say 10% the more angular that the vectors are going to be so see how they are not a smooth transition so if I undo that and then the higher then they will be quite smooth now I'll be completely honest with you 99% of the time I leave these as the b4 values which are two for the speckled size and 75 for the smoothness so I'm going to create the vectors you can see that I've got all that my vectors created there okay so what I'm going to do now is just show you how to machine these so that's its most basic this tutorial I'm just going to show you how you can trace around an image and then machine it I'm pretty sure that I will have a couple of problems with the vectors that this is generated because it's quite a complex drawing and they the way that I can check that is the quickest way is to just try to create it's all puff on there so I'm just going to try to be bit coffees so if I go over to tool puffs on the right hand side and then come down to create VB carving tool path and what I'm going to do is to select a carving tool and let's use have one the quarter-inch 90 degree V bit click select set up my material let's just say for instance this is one-inch thick material you put the materials into zero at the top or the bottom depending on how your CNC is set up so that's okay and then select all of the vectors so another way to do this just draw a box around everything click refresh and it's given me an error saying that vector intersections were found in the selection and size please identify and correct using the vector doctor now I'll show you how you can use this vector dancer so you can spot any problems so let me close the V be carving and we'll saute any problems that we've got with this image right so the vector dr. is next to the bitmap to vector tool so click on that and don't worry about select specific vectors this is just a selection tool what I'm going to come down to is identified problems now by default you will have both of these options ticked so if I select identify it will give me green and red circles wherever there's a problem and as you can see I've got a lot of problems here okay now if I were to try to fix all of these errors that are in this drawing then it would take me quite a long time I'm going to show you how you can get around this and how you can fix these now the coincident points are not really important for machining so what I'm going to do is turn them off I'm going to clear the markers and I'm going to identify again so that looks a bit better so I can see here on the eye that I've got a green circle so if i zoom in on there what this is doing it basically thinks that this is overlapping and it's a bit too close to the edge here so what I'm going to do is just delete that because I don't really need select all let's clear the markers and identify it again you can see that I've not got a problem there now now I know that I've got another issue but sometimes you can't see these so especially when it's something like this that's quite these out so I'll show you it a little tip so you can spot any areas that have got problems it seems a bit counterintuitive but zoom out so if you keep on zooming in/out you'll be able to see the circle okay so that's just a little tip so you can see where it is and then if you hover the mouse pointer over that circle and then just zoom in you'll be able to get to the correct position okay so this one is definitely overlapping and creates an amine section over that area so if I select that and just delete it it's not going to cause any problems why delete ink it and let's clear the markers and identify again and that appears to be okay so let me close the vector dr. and let's create the VB carving again and this time it should work okay so let's select the carving tool let's say one and a quarter inch again 90 degree V bit one-inch Beck click refresh and what this does it gives you the maximum depth that this can cut so you can track prior to actually machining it make sure that it doesn't go through the material okay so this is going 9/8 deep so I've got one inch thick material so let's calculate and take a little while because this is quite a complex group of vectors okay so let's close the v-bit carving and all of the red areas are tall paths so if I open up the tool paths on the right hand side here you can see that I've got v-bit carving now what I can do is turn off the 2d view of the tool Puffs using the left lightbulb and there's also a 3d view there so if I go into the 3d view and rotate this around I concern that's off by selecting to toggle the 3d visibility of the tool puffs okay so let's take a look at this let's see what this is actually going to machine-like because by just taking a look at that can't really tell what it's going to look like so the way that we do that is to simulate it so if I right-click on VB carving and then click to simulate tool puff what this will do it will give me a free D image of what's going to be cut now it happens to look like this because I'm actually showing the image in the 3d view then sometimes you may want to do that on this occasion I don't really want to do that I want to just take a look at what's actually being machined so rather than seen the image because the black portions sort of take it away from where I can actually see what's going on so here you can see I've got this blade bitmap now any icon that has a white triangle on the bottom right of the icon means that there's a flyout menu so if you left click hold it down you'll get the options that lie underneath that's icon so need to do is display the material so now I can see what's going on and I can write hey that's a rent now there are a couple of things that I'm not really too keen with now this is how you would create a more advanced piece of VB kaarvok but I'm not going to stop here I'm not too happy with the way that this looks that are a few things that I want to change and also once change the sensor where there's this beak squid or octopus once I get rid of that and put some texting there so first of all what I'm going to do is source any of the bits that are not too happy with namely the scrolls at the top here so you can see that this looks a bit weird here on the other side and also the unicorns the main that's coming down in the back I'm not too happy about that I don't think that it looks right so I'm gonna try and sort that 8 okay so let's go back to the 2d view and take a look at these right so let me turn off the 2d wireframe it's all puff because I don't need to see it and let's all say these areas now straight away I know what's happening with the mains on the unicorn and also the scrolls what's happening is that I've got various small vectors in there and it's going around these vectors so what I'm going to do is just delete them so to do that just draw a box around them and just delete okay so those are the scrolls they should be all good now let's do the same with this unicorn on the right now you just need to get rid of the really small vases okay so that looks okay so what I'm going to do is just double click on the VB carving all of the entities should be selected and just select to calculate now now it may give me an error message name because it may be able to get there a little bit deeper here because the V beats goes down in between the vectors so he goes down as far as it can in between a vector so if I select refresh it may be a little bit deeper so it is so it's 1.17 okay so this is a little bit deeper and if I were to try to machine this name because the fitness of the material is one inch it's obviously going to go through the bed so if I calculate that it will give me an error message that says that all paths will cut through the material base now he does give me the option to carry on with the calculation but what I'm going to do is select no now the way that you can do this is to obviously make the material thicker which I'm going to do to start with so they don't say I've got one and a quarter inch thick material and then in a moment I'll show you how you can limit the VB so if I calculate that you will generate a tall path you so let's close the v-bit carving tool path and I'm going to delete the simulation let's go back to the 3d view and let's simulate that tool path okay so now don'ts have those areas and it's going down to a full V beat and the same with the main on the unicorns now I don't really want them to go this deep okay let's say that I had half an inch material and if I were to go this deep then he would obviously come through the bottom of the material so how do we sort lobbies right so if I double-click on VB carving let's go back to the Sudi view so you can see this and that's that's off and rather than use 1.25 inch Vic material I'm going to set this up to be half an inch material so that's okay right now these it still wants to go 1.17 deep so what I need to do is basically limit this to a depth and to do that you can limit the tool to a maximum depth at the top here so if I click that and let's limit it to a psych water of an inch deep so when it gets there quarter of an inch it's just going to put a flat on the bottom now this still won't look correct because when it does put the flat on the bottom it's going to try to step over so basically it's going to go around with the tip of the V beat and then step / or move over whatever distance is specified in the tool and then go round again so if I click that drop down the step over is point three inches so it's quite a large okay no I'm not too fussed about it I'm going to do is select to calculate me and I'll show you how you can get around that step over problem as well so select calculate now just generate in the tool path and this will go to nowhere near as deep so let's delete the simulation right-click and simulate the toolpath again okay so that looks okay so it's coming down to there and what I was talking about was here it's stepping over by point three inches so that's what's creating this source of Jaggi the zig zag sort of effect so what we need to do for that is two options one option ease to Iver I double-click on VB carving one option is to either drop that's there so the carving tool only steps over slightly but this will take a long time to machine because you're gonna have to step this over boat really my news it means in order to not get that zigzag effect it will also have more wear on the VB which costs quite a bit of money compared to normal in mills so what we're going to do is we're going to add a roughing tool to this so what this will do is all of this area that say on the main here all of this area will be machines using the roughing tool and then it will just go around the edge to do the VB carving so be quite a lot of time and it will look better so if I go to roughing tool and let's use let's say a quarter of an inch end mill click select and select calculating them you okay so close the v-bit carving and I'm just going to delete the simulation and then let's open up the VB carving and I'm going to turn off the VB just there so this is the quarter inch end mill so you can see all of the areas where the quarter of an inch em that these getting in to raw face some of that material and then the VB just goes round the edge okay so if I were to let's do a simulation control bar for this one so you can see what's happening and select play so there you can see it's cutting gate the area for the main on that right-hand unicorn it's just fast forward that so that's where the quarter-inch is getting into so now if I fast simulates the V beat and take a look you can see that those scrolls look ok now there is a small small problem that I've got but there's pretty much no way around this unless you use for the tool which is in the corners you've got this little area here and that's caused by the quarter inch end mill not being able to get into there because of the diameter of the tool so the only way around that really is to use smaller saw okay so the mains still not a hundred percent happy with those so I'm going to show you how you can basically don't want some machine all of this inside here I don't think that it looks right so I'm going to show you how you can limit the V bit so the way that you would do that he's so draw and of a vector that's inside here and then the VB would just go in between the SU lines so what it's trying to do at the moment is going in between here and here so it's got all of this area that it can get into so we need to limit bus so let's delete the simulation and what I'm going to do is you could just draw a line around here and try to copy one really useful thing is that we have a real-time offset so if I go to an offset here so offset vectors rather than enter in any distance in there or anything in there if I hover over a vector watch how the cursor changes from a white arrow to a black arrow okay so when it's a black arrow that means that you can grab this vector and move it's an offset see in real time so if I grab that and move it you can see that I can just offset that vector so let's bring it to a bit there maybe and so better there okay and then I'm going to select that one and just delete it so what this is going to do it's going to be bits inside here rather than going over the whole area let's do the same for this one just delete but I'm not going to bother for the scrolls I think that they look okay so let's close that it's double click on the V bit carving and what I need to do is add these to the selection because they had new objects so if I press shift them on the keyboard and click on them it will just add them and then select calculate now and this should look a little bit different you okay so if I close the VB carving and let's just right-click and simulate the tool path now you can see that it's limited the V bits of work arranged just the H of the main and I like that personally a lot better Izumo else it looks pretty good and I could just machine this and be completely happy with these but what I want to do is get rid of the center portion and put some text in there so I'll show you how you can do that so if I go to 2d view and let's turn off the tool puffs and they seem in on this center area then if I have a look here I can see that this is connected to the center area that I want to keep so what I need to do is cut this up so it's not connected any longer now I can do that really easy by using the node editing tool so if I go to here it takes me into node editing now I have to have the object selected when I go into this tool so I can see it so if I select that what this does it displays all of the points on this particular vector so here you can see got quite a few points because it's quite a curvy vector now what you can do is just grab one of these and actually change the shape so if there is an area that doesn't look correct or you want to change it you can do that by using node editing what I'm going to do is use it to cut up this portion here so it's not connected to so if I right-click on one of these blue nodes blue nodes are smooth nodes if you see any black nodes they're sharp nodes okay so if I right-click on it I'm going to come up to cut a vector the shortcut for that as you can see next three is C on the keyboard so if I cut the vector there you can see that it turns to this black node and then hover it over there and press the C on the keyboard and it will cut up that vector now a couple of ways that you can get out of node editing you can click the cross there or you can just left click and then left click again and it takes you out of it or you can press escape on the keyboard if I select Latin air you can see that it's not connected to this portion of the vector so I can then delete that I'll delete this one just so it's not showing and then where I need to do is join this vector up so if I select them there I'm going to come down to the bottom and then rather than close with a line I want to close with a curve so if I hold the left mouse button there come over to close vector with the curve and then I can zoom out and then what I'm going to do is just draw a box around here delete that try to just deletes all of this Center portion you okay so that looks as though it's all deleted and what I'm going to do is turn off the image because I don't really need to see that now I can do that by opening up the bitmap layers and you can see that I've got this hand-drawn nautical elements image in there and let's just click on visibility so I can light bulb and it would just turn it off don't need to see that anymore okay so a couple of things that I'm going to do now I'm going to create some tanks but I'm going to do the text on the curve so let's draw a circle I'm going to do this in the center here so you can see that I'm moving around and you see where that changes this is what we call snapping so it's snapping to the center so he automatically knows that this is the sensor so if I left click and then bring that out and let's bring it out to a trained debate over there I think just right-click to accept okay so one going to do is create some text nib now there are a couple of ways that you can do this you can create the text and then move it so it goes around the curve what I'm going to do is to select the curve or the circle and then go into create vector text and it will automatically know that once a creates it's around the circle so if I type in what I want like so they by default this will be set to left justify like that so that you can see I've got these Neptunes and I want to place that's in the center up here so to do that what you can do is select this blue dot Blair and move it around now this blue dot or basically lock on any of the quadrants that I've got here so you see how the cursor changes there that means that its lot to that point at the top if I want to put this in the center then what I would need to do is to click on the center they so it moves the blue dot to be in the center of the text and then I can move that and then lock it to the top there so this looks ok it's just the sizing that I need to sort out so to edit this tanks what you need to do is to hover over the right hand side you can see that I get this eye single left click and then bring that all the way to the left and then release this is all selected now so what I can do is change the size of that so let's just try some random size let's say one inch one and a quarter that doesn't look too bad so what I'm going to do is go down to the on a curve click on that and then the position I've got that I can specify or I can go below the line now when you do go below the line you can see that it all bunches together quite a lot so what I need to do is space this out so that's with the spacing here so I need to bring that up so let's just keep on bringing maths up and so it looks okay okay so that looks okay I think I'm happy with that so when you happy with that select create and then you don't need to keep this circle if you don't want to I can just delete now I'm going to do some more tanks on a curve but this time it's not going to be a circle so you can do this along any curve so to do this I'm going to create a polyline which is basically just that the line now when you select this you have the option to draw normal lines so just straight jacket lines or you have the option to draw smooth lines so if I click on there you see that I've got this s next to the cursor you can see that it's drawing smooth lines now a couple of quick tips with this if you press s again on the keyboard you will come out of smooth and then you can start drawing just the straight lines press s again it toggles back into smooth now if you ever make a mistake whilst doing this there's nothing more frustrating than copying something manually I'm going ran the whole thing and then realizing that halfway through you made a mistake what you can do is press - on the keyboard and it steps back through these points that you've created and then you can carry on okay so just a few tips now also if you right-click and creates the vector you have to go back into the tool if you want C to draw another line I'll show you another way that you can keep the tool open so if you start drawing some lines and then you want it to create another line rather than just create and then close and then you need to go back into the tool press a space on the keyboard and it allows you to keep the tool open okay so just a few tips using the polylines all there so let's delete those and then I'm going to draw maybe from there to there and what you can do with this is if you go into no dignity you see how this is going quite straight at the moment so I want to curve it around a little bit so if I go into node editing see I've got these white sort of handles there these control the Bezier curves so the curvature of this line so if I grab that I can move it there give it more of a nice curvature okay so I'm going to do the same thing again over this area so select the curve and create vector text and then I'm going to type in retreats like so and let's move that so it snaps on to the center now with this one I want this to be above the line so this so that position above line now that doesn't look too bad be completely fair what I'm going to do is just select all of that maybe drop the spacing dangerous a little bit and I may just make but a little bit smaller select create and then I can delete that line and then finally what I'm going to do is just select this trident here I'm going to copy into the center so what I'm going to do is just literally draw a box around that and it selects all the fat now if you happen to select something else just press shift on the keyboard and then left click to deselect it okay now what I'm going to do is to copy these so if I move over like so just select it again and if I hover over it I can actually move that array if I left click what I'm going to do is press control there whilst doing this I'm just going to drop it anywhere okay so that's created a copy know what I can do is same so that's in the model so to do that shortcut for it is f9 I'm just going to go to Venter and a line and center that's in the model now you can see that it's too large and I'll need to make it a bit smaller so that's really easy to do what we do with the Trident still selected is go to transform and then you can enter a size here and maintain the aspect ratio and maintain the aspect ratio it's entirely up to you but what I'm going to do is just grab one of the diagonal red dots and then just move that there now you can see the reefs moving it down to the the anchor points of the bottom left hand corner if it does that press alt on the keyboard and it will do it from the center I'm going to bring that dancer there and you can see that it's still touching there so I'm just going to use the arrow keys and move that up a bit there that looks okay so I'm going to run my VB carving again so double click you can see that it's not selected any of these so let's press control a selects everything and then calculate you okay so let's close the VB carving or delete the simulation and then right click and let's simulate again let's see the final piece okay so that looks quite good it's carved all of those takes there what I can do now is to change the color of this if I wanted to so let's go to simulation let's add a depth color select apply so it's black if I want to see to add another cover change the color of face just right click here and add to call this let say that I wanted to add maybe more of a tan sort of color and insulate it's okay changes the color there let's change the material so the let's make this say lights okay looks like it could go back to back if it wants it to writes so and that's how we create more advanced v-bit carving how to generate really quickly tracings around images and then just carve them using Gavi bit right so the only thing left to do is to send this to the CNC machine so to do that what you need to do is go to tool paths and then go to save tool paths what this will do it will take you to the save toolpaths dialog box now because I've got two different tools I'll probably want to do these as two different files so I can send them to the machine separately unless I've got a tall Challenger where I could do them at the same time just make sure that I've got the tool number that corresponds to the carousel if I didn't have a tool changer let's just save they used tool paths through separate files I'm also going to append the tool path details so the file names and then I'm going to browse I'm going to find the file for that let's call the tunes select open and then the machine file format is what we call post processes so these are basically converters that will convert the information or the tool puffs from caf-co maker into a format that your CNC machine will understand now there are literally hundreds in this list so you're more than likely going to find your CNC listed on here if you have an imported machine more than likely be using g-code Arc so I'm going to use that and then I'm going to select to save and that saves the files into that location that I specified which should be then here and then what I can do is if you right-click and select open weave and then just associate it with WordPad because all that it is is just literally commands and coordinates which tell your machine what to do so send this to your machine however you do it and then you'll be able to machine whatever there's being a port from carved home maker so thank you for watching this tutorial I hope that you found it useful and hopefully I'll catch you on the next one Cheers take care good bye you

Channel: Carveco

Views: 14,389

Keywords: vbit, carving, carveco, maker, tutorial, woodworking, routing, wood, sign, signmaking, v-bit, toolpath, tooling, artcam, v-carving, express

Id: vUyPZp4H-kQ

Length: 54min 39sec (3279 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019