Design Projects From Difficult Bitmaps [When Bitmap Tracing Isn't Enough] - Garrett Fromme

hi i'm garrett with idc woodcraft and i am so glad you have come to this video especially if you use the vectric software whether it's aspire desktop or pro and you've done work with it for a little while now you're starting to get to the more complex stuff where you're trying to import a bitmap and trying to figure out what to do with it like i'm not talking about a plain old bitmap where you can use the trace feature i'm talking about the bitmaps where the trace feature doesn't work and you have to superimpose your work over the project to basically design it from scratch but use the image as a baseline this video is going to teach you the entire process of how to set it up the thinking process of building it and you're going to learn a shitload of tools in this video i mean you're going to learn a lot of stuff it's going to be a long tutorial but i can guarantee you're going to learn more in this tutorial then you're going to learn and watching 20 to 30 hours youtube otherwise by the time you come out of this you're going to be an expert if you're brand new to cnc routers or the vectric software subscribe to this video because i deep dive on this stuff to give you the real stuff you know most youtube channels out there they seem to be superficial they don't give you the nuts and bolts that you need that's what i do here all right without further ado we're going to dive in you might want to jump onto your software and follow along just do the same stuff i'm doing and you will see how this comes together you'll be so proud of your work we're going to dive on in and get started so let's go i'm going to take this image here and turn it into a project this is not something we use a bitmap tracing on we have to do this by hand and you'll understand this when we start diving into it and when we're done we will have this logo built up where we have the fire department icons like the nozzle and the axes and the jaws of life we have the hazard symbol we've got some cool features this looks like a shield right the rivets here and the words now that etsy file you'll be able to change the words if you have vector software if you have an svg you'll be able to overwrite your own files on it so again the link will be down below but this is a long video so we are just going to start from the beginning and get going i am going to let you know you can do this in aspire desktop and pro so we are going to grab a fire department image and import it in here and we're going to draw it up by hand the thing is is the intention behind this video is to teach you how to take an obscure drawing or something that's not very crisp and clear and to freehand it through vectric using the tools and giving you the thought process of putting a project together so first thing is we have to grab our logo that we are going to use and i want to teach you quickly how to grab a logo that you can import and start working with so you can go to google and type up in the search bar whatever logo or image it is that you want we are going to take fire department image because i was a firefighter for quite a few years and an emt as well and enjoyed it and yeah so it's kind of close to my heart now the first thing i want to tell you is when you're grabbing an image and you see an image that's got a price on it somebody's trying to sell that right they've done some work and unfortunately it's uh it's a habit for a lot of people to just take a snip of the image and create the project and to me that's kind of morally wrong and when someone has done some work and they're trying to put something out there for you to use and they're selling a vector buy the vector you know i always look at it from my shoes if i did the work and i put it out there and somebody grabbed it and copied it and used it for their own use i wouldn't like that now that would you so do the nice thing so i looked for a fire department image that was not a vector and i selected a fire department image that was uh not for sale i took a particular fire department image and i'll import it here just a little bit but the way that you would grab your image we'll just do this one it's a pretty cool image okay i clicked on it it took me to etsy that means that this is a vector file so we're not going to do that one very cool vector file i'm not even going to show you how to do that one because of what i just said we'll grab let's just grab this one it's very generic okay so we have an image there you can use your snipping tool click that and click new and draw your window around that and when you have that you just save the image and save it as whatever wherever you want it and you are ready to go and then you can import that image so i don't need that one so we're not going to use that one then we go into vector electric and we're going to start a new project so i start that and the when you start a project you always get your job setup screen and so we are going to select the single sided we're going to go with the 24 inches by 24 inches by three quarters of an inch off the top of the material and in this case because a fire department symbol is symmetrical on four sides we want to start building off center of this so we're going to select the center radio button and select ok [Music] to import your image the bitmap that's what you want to do first you'll come up to file operations the last icon it's a little folder with a little blue tab coming out of it select that and go to the directory that you want to import your image from so here's the badge that i selected when you selected it comes in it's got dotted lines around it and it's fairly small relative to my job so i'm going to click that again so i get these buttons over it and hold my shift button down and expand it like that so i can work with it now the reason i held the shift button down is it expands from center if i don't hold the shift button down and grab that inner button it'll expand from the lower corner or the opposite corner so i don't want that i want to expand it on center because like i said a fire department symbol is symmetric around four sides now i chose this one because it's very cool looks like a shield and it's got some cool stuff in it you know it's got this nice corners and it's got rivets on it it's got some detail on it that just makes it look badass so the first thing we want to do is since this is symmetrical we want to put it in position on the on the project so it is on center the first thing i'm noticing is the this center rivet here is lower than the horizontal line and i've seen it down here too the rivet is to the right of the horizontal line so we're going to move this image to the position that i want it to go now i can use the cursor buttons while the project is highlighted or the image is highlighted you can see these purple dashed lines means it's highlighted and i can cursor it up and around as much as i want to eyeball it into place but i can't really tell when i'm that far away so what we're going to do instead is i'm going to grab a polyline or a straight line using this button here click it and i'm going to turn on my snaps you see this these two buttons here click them so they are boxed in and while i'm in my line tool i'm going to come down and let that snap onto that line that horizontal reference line so we're there and now i'm just going to come over to the other side anywhere and let it snap there i'm going to hit spacebar and do the same thing at the bottom so i've clicked on the bottom and i've clicked on the top and now we have a cross hair that we can set this thing up with so i'm going to click the image so it is selected i'm going to zoom in and i'm going to cursor this guy up so it's approximately on center and then i'm going to fix it down at the bottom as well so i'm going to use the cursor buttons and i'm using the left cursor button and it moved it over there so we're in position let's take a look so we're a little low there which means the picture is rotated a little bit that doesn't matter to me because we are going to freehand all this or design it all it's not really freehand we're going to take advantage of the uh all the different features in vectrix so you're going to learn a lot of stuff in this and techniques and you're going to learn the thought process of how to set a job up so i'm going to bring that up just a little bit to try to split the difference between the two we'll take a look at that one take a look at that one we're pretty much splitting the difference and we'll do the same thing up top if it's off which it is just a little bit so we'll bring that over just a little bit and now we're splitting the difference between the top and the bottom okay so we have that so one of the things that you could try to do is use the trace bitmap feature we don't want to do that because this is a more of a drawing type of rendering there aren't clean crisp lines throughout this the transition from red to lighter red to the gold is fuzzy there's a dark shadowy line there and so if we use the trace bitmap feature here it's not going to come in clean at all so we are going to build this from scratch well at this point we have learned how to import a file and we've done a lot of talking about the image itself got it centered up now we're going to get into the thought process ahead of time what you want to do is look at your project and think about what do you want the outcome to be all the way throughout because if you don't do that you're going to run into problems later in your design so that's what we're going to do we're going to get to the thought process now the pre-planning if you will so let's get into it so here's my thought process when i go into a project that i want you to use it'll make your life much easier as you progress into your design and when you do tool paths a project has different elements in it we want to look at it in a way of what do we want to get out of it and what do we want to be able to manage independently of from other elements of the drawing so in this case the first element is the outer boundary of the project that would basically be the cut out and i'll call that the body of the project then we have the lettering or the words so if i wanted to make this for my local fire department madison indiana that needs to be separate so that needs to be its own entity within this drawing and then we have the icons here the jaws of life the axes the medical symbol there's a little badge in the middle and some smaller icons there so that's going to be another layer or another entity we'll call that icons and then we have another one which is the rivets so these are details and there's there's another feature i want to add into this i want to add a few v grooves you can see right here there's like a dark band there and then there's another band right here so we're going to add like a v groove line that goes around there there's other areas that we have to think about we have this jaws of life that have a lot of little features in them there's the separation between the jaws there's these little circles here that actually make it very distinguishable and then this little pocket area there and there so we want to keep all this into account and then there's one other thing the big element what's going to make this pop out what's going to make it pop is if we do some depth work or what we call pocketing work for example the jaws of life here if we just carved lines out i mean it'll look nice but we want it to be in more of a 3d effect same with the axes so the all the red areas are going to be what's called a pocket it's all going to be cut down lower than the rest of the surfaces so we've got several different elements to think about here so what we're going to do is segment all these elements right up front so we know we kind of got it in our mind and the way we do that is by setting up our layers right now now layers are like sheets of plastic that gets stacked on top of each other and each sheet has its own aspects drawn on it so one layer or one sheet will have the icons of the jaws of life the axis and the medical symbol drawn on it another sheet will have the fire department name on it another sheet will be the outer boundary and so forth and the the sheets are clear so you can see through them so when they're all together you can see the entire object but sometimes you want to get a sheet out of there so it cleans things up so we're going to create those sheets or those layers by coming up to the layer feature right up here and we're going to click that now you see that there are two layers up here there's the bitmap layer and a layer one when you launch vectric layer one is automatically installed and you'll be working on layer one when you import a picture like we did with the fire department symbol it creates a new layer called the bitmap layer and that symbol is on that layer so i now have two plastic sheets and let's just say i wanted to take the the badge out of the stack for just a minute the way i would do that is this little light bulb here you would click that and now that image is gone it's still in here you just can't see it and you're not working on it but you notice the cross hairs are still here because they are drawn on layer one now the crosshairs are a construction line so i don't want them on my main layer i might want them there i'm going to leave them there right now but we are probably going to create a layer just for that so when i turn the bitmap layer back on we're going to start to figure out what layers we need so the first layer is the body what we can do is come up to layer one click it and change the name to body so we have that now we've got other layers we have the text we have the icons we have the the pocketing and we have the details so we're going to add layers by clicking add new layer so we're going to just kind of run it off in our head so click for the text click for pockets click for details click for icons and now let's start giving them the names so we click layer 1 and we'll call that text click layer 2 twice and we'll call that pocket click layer 3 twice and we're going to call that icon and we'll click layer 4 twice and we'll call that detail and we'll add another layer because we talked about construction lines so we'll just add that layer we're going to call it construction now we want to be able to segment between layers like colors so when we're looking at it we know it's on a specific layer so what these these black areas enable you to change the color so for construction i'm going to click the black box and that color window is going to pop up but we're going to give it a an unusual color we'll give it a bright green color for the detail we'll give it a dark blue color for icons we'll color them red pockets will make it a darker green let me go to a darker green and text will make that um we'll give it a light blue color and body will leave as black so we are almost ready to go but we are not on the right layer we are on the construction layer we're going to start growing so we want to get to the body layer so open that up click body body is selected there the text is bold relative to the rest of the text and it says body up here so we know we are on the body layer okay so now we've got all our basics set up we've got all your layers established you really know how you're going to start putting this thing together and everything's centered up now it's time to start doing our first level design which is the body of the emblem you're going to learn some really cool stuff how to make this work in a very easy fashion i know this is a long video i apologize however this is what it takes to do a design type of process to make good ones right so that's why you need to stick with this thing and we're going to get into the tool paths all that so we get this all set up if you're brand new the vectric software subscribe there's a lot of videos on this channel that'll teach you all kinds of aspects about it so yeah let's get back into this let's design the emblem of this thing the outer boundary the basic level let's go let's look at this so we have a crown on top and then we have the identical crown on the side another one here and another one over here so what we need to do is draw the first crown and then we'll copy it around a circle and this this this is our circle we're going to copy around so that circle has to be a baseline that we're going to be working from and as part of the element of this whole project it's the boundary of this pocket here it's a boundary over here what i am going to do is i'm going to blend this gold part up here into the circle here so that'll all be one one band and it'll connect all the way around so you'll understand as we go as uh as we go along but we need our base circle which starts right here so what we're going to do is basically just draw a circle i'm zooming in so i can get my circle close my snaps are turned on so we're going to use the circle command and create vectors click that and just come down to the center where the two crosshairs intersect click our left mouse button hold it and bring it out to the point where the red meets the white and we have it so it's overshot a little bit now one of the things when i'm doing this the red area and the pink line do not show up well together so i'm just going to escape twice so you can see the circle that we created it's not quite on the circle but that doesn't really matter because we are modifying this ourselves i just have to think do i want to make the circle a little smaller i might do that i think i will so what i i can actually modify this circle by clicking it twice and a little radio button shows up around the circle i click that and i can just shrink it down a little bit and now we brought our circle in a little closer so that looks good okay so now we can start on the crown one of the things i want you to notice is the crown half on the left is identical to the crown half on the right so we don't have to draw the whole thing we just need to draw half of it and do a mirror function so that's exactly what we're going to do now i can start drawing a line from this part of the badge or shield and draw it up following this white line here you see this gold line by the way that's going to be an added feature i'm going to put a little v-groove around the inside of this and we'll put another v-groove like right around here it's just going to add accent to this so we don't want to just draw a line up this side because there's something we want to take into consideration is basically the size of this area right in here if i'm going to cut this out as it is in this badge here i have to make sure the bits i'm going to be using are going to cut it out we'll just say i'm going to use a quarter inch end mill so that means the cut the width of this cutout has to fit the end mill that means i have to create a space that's at a quarter inch or bigger and so in order to do that what we're going to do is make sure that's going to happen now we know this area here is 45 degrees off the vertical so basically just going to grab a line the polyline tool and we're going to come to the center of the project i'm gonna click once so we have a line there and we're gonna swing up until our number next to the cursor says a equals 45. that tells me i'm at 45 degrees and this is a construction line by the way but i'm going to leave it on the current layer because i only need it temporarily i'm going to come up and extend past the shield and click so i have that line so we are good there and i'm going to hit escape and we have that line so in order to make sure we have enough room for a quarter inch end mill i have to have at least an eighth of an inch clearance on this side of the line so what we're going to do is use our offset command under offset and layout you're going to pick the first box offset select that and you want to select the button outside right what it's going to do is going to copy a line to either the right of the line or outside of a shape so this would be outside right it'll be right over the line and we want to make sure we have at least half of the quarter inch bit distance that we're going to create you'll understand this later so please just come with me on this so half of a quarter inch is 0.125 i'm going to give a little bit extra i'm going to say 0.13 and we'll click create and now we've created a new line and that is the boundary line of our crown i'm going to escape i don't need this line anymore the construction line i just had now we're going to draw the curve along here i can use the curve the arc command multiple times but i don't want to do that i'm going to draw a curve freehand so we're going to select the draw curve line and basically eyeball along the white area of this line as if it's just going to continue on until it intersects with that line that i just created and i'm going to click so i've started a line right there and we're going to come down and now because what's happening is it's popping into certain places i don't want it to pop into certain places i want to be able to freely position each point as i move along so what i need to do at this point is turn the snaps off you wanted the snaps on to click on that line so now i'm going to go along the white area and click and watch what happens to this line when i click the next time i'm going to pick my point and now we're getting an arc drawing which is exactly what we want the tighter the curve the closer you want it to be as the curve spreads out then you can get a little further away from the last pick point we're coming into a tight curve here so we're going to start getting a little bit closer and the radius is reversing so we're going to come up to about here now at this last point we need to turn our snap on because we wanted to select that line so we turn the snaps back on right up here and now we can select the line right about there and we'll let it go straight across to see what happens now i just ran into a problem see how this comes back down what it's going to do is go back up on the other side and go back down so we're going to fix that very quick by selecting the line pressing n for node and we're going to grab that node and we're going to slide it up until we get a dotted line over this area and that's still not good enough so we want to go up more and it doesn't matter we can actually just kind of go up to there as long as this flag right here is perpendicular and it's snapped into perpendicular now the tangent point where this curve intersects this line is tangent and it'll come back down nice and smoothly and we can adjust our other nodes if we need to but everything looks good here so we're going to escape and to turn the bitmap off briefly that's half of our crown but it's not complete because it looks a little funny up here but we're not going to worry about that yet because we're going to draw the other side of the boundary we're going to do this edge now so now we can take this line that we drew and we're going to click it twice and now you see dots showed up here here way over here what vectric is doing is creating a rectangle around that line of this maximum elements there's also a dot in the middle right there what you want to do is hold your control and your shift down and hover over that dot so you have the four arrows click your left mouse button and hold and now we have created a copy now we're going to drag it over and put it on the other line and so now we've created the inside boundary up on this part it's not going to work up here though with this one i'll show you why i'm going to click that one twice we have our dots we're going to hold ctrl and shift down and hover over that middle button and bring it down and you see our curve does not really match what we have actually it's not so bad it matches some of it but not all of it so we can do a little fixing up on this by selecting that line hitting node and start moving our nodes around when i move my nodes around i always turn off the snaps so i don't get impeded by it trying to select its own lines come down there we're going to come down here and we want this to twist that way so i want this one to twist what i'm going to do is drag this one over past this little v because we're going to put that v in our project but i want this to be perpendicular to wherever i draw that line at so what i'm going to do is leave that alone for the moment you'll see what i'm going to be doing here i'm going to draw a line for my v so i've escaped i'm going to turn snaps back on go back to polyline and take a line and we're just going to draw it down like that to create a wedge so now we've got a funny shape here we got lines doing funny things how do we fix this get your scissors select that and start cutting lines from the end and we're just cut it right there and we are ready to go now we have our shape and let me show you what it looks like now by turning this bitmap off so you see this is starting to come together alright so you have seen how we have started to actually construct this and this is going to start to fall together in a really cool way but we have to finish up this half of the crown and then you're going to learn how to utilize the mirror function and the circular copy function very very handy tools that work really well with this kind of project so if you're liking this give me a thumbs up and i've gotta give hats off to you you're sticking around we do have a long way to go but by the time you're done you are going to know a lot more about design work and the thought process in it so let's get back into it we're going to turn the bitmap back on for a moment we want our bands to be complete now i did not draw something i did not draw another circle i need another circle right here so i'm just going to put that in place right now this is stuff you can do i'm not there's no particular order on this i'm just saying it's part of the main body of this gold area so i want to put that in there as part of it right now so i can selected circle went over the middle with my snaps on and i'm just coming out to draw that circle and i'm eyeballing it just make sure it kind of falls into where i want it to go and there it is so now that circle is in place my inner band is done and i think we're almost ready let's turn our bitmap off then we're going to start cleaning things up so what we'll do is grab the scissors again and this is where it starts to look like something we're going to start snipping lines from the outside inward and there and there so now you see it's starting to come together all that construction line looked like a mess and now looks like something but it doesn't look right up in this corner basically it's not going to work with that sharp corner you'll break your wood when you try to cut it out uh router bits can't get that far into such tight angles so what we're going to do is just round that out right now by selecting the edit objects area under fill it third icon down furthest to the left and you want to have normal fill it selected and pick a radius i'm picking uh .05 and just hover over the corner and click it and so now we've gotten rid of that still a little bit of uh that will still be maybe an issue i'm going to bring it ctrl z i'm going to change that to a 0.1 and see what it looks like that way okay that looks better we're going to exit out of that we're going to look at our project and i think we're about ready to mirror things however we've got a couple details to take care of we have this rivet right here which is also on the far corner here so we're going to draw that rivet right now the first thing we're going to do is switch our layers so we're going to click that and go to the the details layer which is where the room is going to be i click that and highlight it and highlight it up here and we're going to select circle and hover over this and voila we have just created our rivet you can see it's blue so now we can tell what it is is there any other symmetry that i need to get in here there actually is remember i said we're going to add a little v groove along the gold line there so we're going to add that right now that's going to be part of our details so we're on the detail layer i'm going to select this line i'm going to click offset and i want it to be on the inside left and we'll see what happens so i'm going to put it an eighth of an inch on the inside so we're going to type in 0.125 and click and now we created our baseline for our accent i'm going to do the same on the other one the this line right here i'm gonna select that go back to offset and i'm gonna do it on the outside right select and it so what it did it did it on the inside and it's kind of hard to explain why it did that but when that happens just ctrl z select the opposite one and click it again and it'll show up the way you want it to so i've got my accent lines but i don't want them to go all the way across all the way down so we're going to clean these up a little bit just by drawing some lines uh right there and i want my accent for the little v groove accent that comes around this one just to stop right maybe here so i'll draw another line go right across there and i'm going to use these as cut lines and hit spacebar and this one i don't think i want it to come up and down maybe i do i've got an interesting little feature there we'll go ahead and leave that like that for right now and see how that shows up i'm going to close and use the cut feature and i can see this is this blue line is crossing into the circle if i cut the line here it's going to leave this part of that accent line there and i don't want that you can see it's going to interfere with our words so i'm going to control z that and i'm going to start on the other end right over here here and here and i cut the line up to that line that i drew right there then i want to eliminate it there and i want to eliminate it up here you can see that line is actually going across so i'm going to cut it there as well so we're going to escape delete and let's see what we have for our accent lines at this moment so we're going to turn off we we're going to turn off the bitmap and we're going to turn off our body and there are our accent lines now obviously i've got a little hash line in there i'm not going to get i'm not going to want so we got to go in and get rid of that so i'm going to select it and delete so we've got some of our features drawn up there's one other accent that i want do i want to come up to a point here when i've got a radius over here i'll probably just leave that there for right now let's go back to the bitmap and remember i was going to do a little v-groove accent right here so select the circle and do the same thing we're going to go to offset inside and our number is already set then you click create and it created that line a line is i want that line to be a little bit further in from the circle you can't see it there we go i'm going to move that line now look at that we've got a little vector right there this is where you want to be really careful that little line that was right here was from that detail line i did before when it offset it crossed over this circle here that's why we try to do things a batch at a time i'm going to click this circle and i'm going to just make it a little smaller i double clicked it i'm going to grab the little button here and just oh ctrl z um i didn't hold my shift down so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to back up several spaces get rid of that circle get rid of that little tab there click this line again go back into offset and i'm going to make that 0.15 and offset and it moved it in further i know it's hard to see on the screen because of the dark line that's there but here's what we just drew this slide right here okay so we are ready to start mirroring things so we're going to go to the body we're going to click that and make that the active layer and we're going to turn off the bitmap layer and we're going to mirror these items right there so i've selected them all and i'm going to go to the tray transform objects and select the mirror function select that and in this area what you want to do is have this check box checked flip about job center this cross hair defines the job center so we want this part of the crown to copy over here and we want it to flip off that center and we're going to flip it horizontal the other thing you want to make sure is checked is create a mirrored copy if that box is not checked and you try to do this watch what happens i uncheck the box and let's get back into it gonna hit the wrong button there we go and i hit um i've got that selected and i flip horizontal now it just copied on the other side but it eliminated the one on the other on the the original one so ctrl z have this box checked and flip horizontal and there we are we now have our crown we're done with the details right now and although we're not we have a rivet right in the middle here so i want to close this turn the bitmap back on so we have a rivet right here and a little bit of a ring type of feature there and i don't know if i want to add that in there or not we might we might not so i got to get another rivet here on the detail layer so we're going to switch over to the detail layer a lot of thought that goes into these more advanced projects i'm turning off the bitmap layer i'm going to select that rivet twice hold ctrl and shift down and grab the middle button and drag it what i did is they left the original and it made a copy so we're going to drag that copy until it snaps onto the middle line and we're going to place it on the vertical where we want it to be so we'll put it right in the middle and now we are getting really close to being done here but we got one more thing we have to fix before we can create the rest of this and we are very very very close to this so you're going to like this at this point we need to make sure that our vectors around this area here are all connected as well as the vectors around the outside when you mirror it's going to make a copy but it didn't create it didn't merge the vectors you see when i click this one it highlights but it doesn't highlight this one so we have to join these two so what i'm going to do is hit shift button select that line so now both of them are highlighted and we're going to zoom out for a minute because i want to make sure everything is selected around that crown we just drew all right we got it so anywhere on your screen right click come down to join vectors and you can join your vectors with a curve or a line now that is one vector i can select it and the whole thing is selected the same goes for this one down here you can see it's not connected so you hold shift select the other one right click join or close vectors and close vectors with a line or a you want to do that one with a line and we're going to zoom in just to make sure so we're good to go i'm going to hit escape i'm going to select the line just to verify we are good that was a long stretch but we are about to create this whole body now so we have a fire department emblem so this is cool we are going to do the circular array function now all right let's just keep on going so we're going to create the badge and i'm going to tell you a firefighter story i'm selecting from the lower right lower left and i'm making a window so i encompass everything and it's all selected down under offset and layout select circular copy we have everything selected we want to create four crowns that rotate with that circle [Music] in order to make sure that happens we have to have this check box checked you see this little image right here where all little rectangles are facing inwards what that's telling you is that as it creates copies it's going to rotate the copies based on a center point if i uncheck this box everything is up and down that means it'll rotate around the center point but it won't rotate the objects meaning the crown would copy around the center but it'll always be in the same orientation we want it to rotate so we're going to select that box we want it to rotate and we want four copies so that's what goes in this box here there's gonna be one two three four and it's going to be around the full circumference that means 360 degrees will be our total angle and we want it to rotate around the center point that center point is zero zero so we need to make sure these two boxes say zero zero that's defining our center point this one's x says zero y does not so we need to change that to zero and you click copy close that click off to the side and there is our basic badge now i am going to turn off the details layer first we are going to select body and turn off detail there's one other thing we have to fix here if you remember that this gold band is going to be a part of the circle gold band so i'm going to select everything is turned on here i'm going to turn the bitmap back off and i'm going to take my cut tool and oops close pick the wrong tool cutting tool and we're going to cut those elements so control z and miscut there so something's going on ctrl z which tells me it didn't rotate properly so i did a design error in here that i have to fix so what i'm going to god dang this is frustrating when this happens because now it's not dead nuts concentric it's because something was put in off-center and it's probably the original circle that i put in right there so i'm going to fix this really quick here's how you fix this it's frustrating when that happens i'm control z i'm going to close that i'm going to create a brand new circle i'm going to snap to the middle and we are going to come out past the current circle that's right to there and look at what's going on this is how we troubleshoot things when they show up because i've been i was really trying to be careful with this when this happened because it happened to me the first time i shot this video so what i'm trying to do is figure out what is off and how to fix it so here's how we fix this it looks like the circle itself i think is pretty good here's what we do we grab everything that we just did we're going to turn the details back on and we are going to grab all of our details so i'm going to grab that one i'm going from left to right i'm going to hold my shift button down grabbing that one that one and that one and any features that it did not select i'm going to reselect and work my way around one more and then i'm going to click it again and check it out make sure it's on the center which it is so that tells me that my circle was off center okay so that's good to know that means all i have to do i can check the circle by clicking it twice and looking at where the pick point goes there it is so all i can do is just move that circle over which is good phew that scared me because that meant i would have had to stop this video again and work on this now i'm going to check these other circles to make sure they are on center by double clicking them making sure that center point is on the center point check that one click it and that one's off so we're going to move that to center and i'm just going to check this enter one again and that one looks good okay so this is the kind of stuff that happens when you're right in the middle of a project and you see there's a major error that you've made how do you get around it so you troubleshoot it and try to work with it so everything else is looking good okay let's turn our details back off get back to where we were we are on the body layer and now i'm going to start cutting we're going to cut there there there there whoo i got a little frustrated because i got way into this video and i had issues i found later that i had to restart the whole thing and you can tell this takes a long time so there's our basic firefighter badge with our pocketing features these are pockets remember that so we're going to move that to the pocket layer right now but we got an issue i didn't catch this before we got to join these so we're going to select that one and that one and we're going to come over to join vectors or close vectors and click it twice and we're going to do this to all four of them so just select click join vectors twice select join vectors twice select join vectors twice and we are good these go over to the pocketing layer so select each each one of those i'm holding shift button down i'm going to right click move to layer pocket so this just let you know i am not perfect right even good designers have issues they have to resolve now you see these change color to a green color all right i'm going to take a break for a moment because my throat is very scratchy and but i do want to tell the story first it was the very last fire run that i was on i was on a fire department for seven years as all volunteer and i was getting to a point where it was time to move on in life and i was the engineer on the first engine out now the engineer is the driver and the person who is running the pumps on the truck that feed the fire hoses to the firefighters who are actually fighting the fire and we got the call and it said there's entrapment and there's a child trapped in the fire and when a firefighter hears that they go into ultimate high alert ultra fast moving and you best believe within three minutes everybody was at the fire station gearing up and trying to get the trucks out the door i lived right across the street from the fire department so by the time people showed up i already had the engine running doors open ready to rip and we got down there and pulled to the fire hydrant and the ripping the fire fire hoses off the truck we have what we call jump hoses um where you're jumping off the truck and you're pulling a hose right away i'm charging the lines and we hear there's a four-year-old stuck inside the house so we get to this house and there's flames coming out of all the windows this house was what they call balloon construction i mean that there's no separation in the walls from the floors so when a fire reaches the walls it works through the drywall on the outside wall and starts to come up to the second floor so there's no fire barrier and we found out we couldn't get in there we couldn't get her it was too hot everything was on fire and we lost katie katie wells was her name little four-year-old that was my last fire run and that's devastating to a firefighter when you lose a child very morbid time that was 25 years ago and it still tears me up right now because we couldn't save her that's the life of a firefighter right we love firefighting going into burning houses but we don't want to lose kids we don't want to lose anybody but kids is what really breaks our heart all right so i'm going to take a little bit of a break and then i'll be back okay i'm back and after that sad story we are going to move on so we have got our basic elements down uh this remember i said about the pocket here well this inside is a pocket as well so we want that to be green too so we're gonna change that to the pocketing layer so we're gonna right click move to layer and we're gonna select pocket okay so i'm pretty happy with this okay this is a challenging project a lot of stuff goes into it now i've gone a bit slower for you so you see what i'm doing but you can tell already it's fairly complex now we're going to start getting into the the utensils we're going to draw out the axe and we're going to draw up the jaws of life and we're going to put a new emblem over the medical emblem we're going to get rid of the medical emblem all together this is where it gets a little fun i mean it's fun already when you know how to do it and you see your project start to form so let's get into the artwork now and have some fun let's go now first thing i want to do is go to layers and turn off the body and i'm going to turn off the text i'm going to turn off pocket and we're going to select the icon so that's the active layer you know by popping up here construction layer is on and there's a one thing i see here that we have to work with and modify and that's going to be this medical symbol the wings come across this which means that would add another element of depth to this whole thing and i don't want to do that so we're going to remove that because it's medical and we're going to put firefighter stuff in there we're going to impose a a firefighter's nozzle for the end of the fire hose so we'll get to that a little bit i want to show you some cool stuff we're going to outline the axes we're going to draw this thing up with details in it and then we're going to import that in there so let's take care of the axis first and the way we're going to do this is we are simply going to freehand all this we're going to draw one ax and then we're going to mirror it and then we'll add a little bit of detail to it then we're going to work on this jaws of life we're going to add the detail to it and then we'll impose import an image in here and draw it up so let's get to working on the axes so i don't want the the snap features turned on for this because i'm it's all going to be freehand so i do want one snap turned on i want the uh um which one do i want to turn on i don't remember i think i want the the the smart snapping on and i'm going to turn the first one off we'll find out in a second most of this is curved line so we're just going to use the curve command which is going to be drill curves we're going to select that and we're just going to start somewhere on the line and we're going to click it and i'm going to click there and remember with the curves you want to draw a curve where radiuses change and start and that is another point so now we don't know where the handle is but we're just going to go right over here okay so i've got the wrong snap turned on i'm going to turn that one off and turn this one on what that's going to do is allow me to if i have to end the line i can pick up back at the point of the line so i'm just going to snap right here come up to here and we're going to come up to this point here and i'm going to hit the space button now i'm going to escape from that and now our red line is drawn i'm doing red on red i apologize about that didn't think about that and we're going to go back into the curve function because we're going to start a new line and i want the reason i did that is because i want this to be a corner and in order to do that it has to i have to stop drawing i'll explain this in just a moment so what i did is i just picked that point back up and started to draw here here and we're just starting to follow our radius up to here and we're going to create another corner so we have to end so before i go on i want to show you what i mean by corner i'm going to hit n and i'm going to select this red line you see there's a black node there whenever we're doing curved lines you're going to it's going to be blue nodes all the way around but this is a sharp corner where the handle meets so i want it to be a black node so i basically have to stop drawing that line and start it over again and the same thing is going to be right here with the corner of the axe now that would be a small radius there i think but we're gonna make it a general point so that's why i did it i wanted to get a black node there so we're gonna go back into draw curve and we're gonna continue on we're going to pick up this point of the axe and you know what this is actually an arc all the way up so i'm just not even going to continue on i'm going to go over to the arc command select that and it's going to restart the line i'm going to pick that end point and make sure it picked it and i'm going to come right up here to this end point click that and then i'm just going to create the arc of the axe and that curve is done so now we're going to go back into the draw curve select that pick up the end point and start our curve now picking points where the arc seems to transition into another arc or curve i should say and once again we're coming to a point where we want this to be a new node so we're just going to select that line and we're going to escape and select it i'm going to escape and select it again all right so it's not working right there we go there i select it again and it didn't finish that up so i have to start that over again so we're just going to do that drawing sometimes can be a challenge it can be frustrating you're always learning stuff as you move along you never stop learning all right hit spacebar and i'm going to start that line up again so you just hit the space bar you don't have to exit out of it and pick your lines up again now this part of the axe is going to be a curve because it is part of the ax so we just made a couple points around it and same with this one right here i'm just going to pick a couple points around it we're gonna come over there and we're gonna hit spacebar again and we're gonna pick that point up again so i hope you get an idea how curves work when you're saying draw curves we're going to have a very nice shape with this when we are all done and i feel a sneeze coming on excuse me bless me i've already been blessed i got you right okay the first axe is almost done so now i got a tight curve here so doing several clicks same with this one here you can see how the ax handle curves back in and then we're just going to pick up that end point and i'm going to hit escape and we are going to turn the badge off and there is our axe it's not cool that's all it took now i'm going to click the axle to make sure the entire ax gets selected it didn't so we need to start connecting lines again which is frustrating so you hit shift you follow the same thing you want to join vectors with a line or with a curve to get everything joined in and i'm going to try to speed up this part of the video as we do this i was thinking that maybe i could show you some new stuff which i'm doing right now but i wish i wish sometimes this stuff just went a little faster now there's a little bit of a goofy spot right here in the ax it gets a little fat in the handle so you fix that hit the node button and come in and select your line and then just drag that area in that doesn't look good and we are ready to go so our axis is done looking good and all we have to do based on the badge is mirror the axe from one side to the other i'm going to show you a little cool thing after that so i'm going to take the axe highlight it we're going to go back into the mirror command under transform objects and everything is going to be the way it was where it's going to mirror a copy and leave the original and we're just going to flip it horizontal and there's our axe now we see there's a little bit of a problem here we're really close right there so i'm going to undo that i'm going to get out of that select the axe and i'm going to rotate it out a little bit just like that and now we'll go back into the the mirror command and go like that now we got a little better uh thing going on here okay so close that there's an issue here that we have to get rid of the on the image when we cut the ax has to be one solid object so we're going to use the cut feature and get rid of the areas where it crosses over i'm holding the left mouse button down just going over it we do that select the axe everything should highlight and we are good to go there's a couple other features we want to add to this if if you want like a line here that would indicate the separation between the handle and the axe it would go here as well and then to make it look like one axis laying underneath the other so that would be a detail so we're gonna switch to detail layers and we're gonna turn it on so i'm gonna select on and hit the detail and i'm going to just use a line to fix that so we'll make this ax the one that's on top of this one it's very simple to do just draw a line not completely across just like that space bar and do it on the other side you just try to get best eyeball on where it connects yeah where it would connect so we've got that and then we'll do the separation of the axis and the handle so put one there to there and we'll do another one from here to here so now we have now looks like that ax here when it gets carved we'll be laying over top of this axe here okay the axes are done that's pretty cool isn't it just coming up with that it was fairly quick but now you understand how to build that up all right now we're going to get into the jaws of life and this gets a little interesting it's actually fairly quick but we're going to be working with details and the the icon shape at the same time so we're going to be bouncing back and forth between two layers to get this built up and then we're going to mirror it and get everything attached so you're going to learn a little bit on this one as well let's go let's get on to the jaws of life now we need to go back to our icon layer click that so it's highlighted and it says icon up here turn the bitmap back on and what we're going to do is draw half of the jaws since this is perfectly symmetrical so we need our base reference line which will be i'm going to turn the details layer off you see the details layer still showing up here so we want to turn that off we'll come back to that in just a minute just getting things out of our way so i don't accidentally mess up with things so i'm going to draw a line right down the middle of that jaws of life there and i want it to be perfectly horizontal it's not so i need to turn on my other snap so it'll pick up a vertical line perfectly vertical so i click and escape escape the line is a little bit off so i'm just going to click it once so it's highlighted and move it over with my cursor buttons it's hard for you to see but there it is and that's going to be my reference line that should actually be a construction line so we'll just uh right click it and move to construction okay let's start drawing up our jaws of life we are going to do this with a line everything's pretty much a line so we're going to use polyline our snaps are turned on and we're going to come right up here where the jaws come together we're going to start drawing our lines it doesn't have to be perfect in this case just drawing various lines now we've got a thing going on here we got a segment here so we're going to add detail to that i'm going to taper things out a little bit instead of going square cuts because the machine's not going to cut like perfectly square things all the time anyway but i'm going to follow these lines and we'll see how this actually pans out when we're when we're done so this is pretty simple here but we're going to add some detail to it as well and i am going to just do it like that and we'll come down we're not even going to worry about the little tab at the end and we're going to finish it off right there so let me show you what we just drew is the body of the jewels of life that's the body and that's on the icon layer now before we flip it or do a mirror copy of it we are going to add some other features to it we want to add our details to it so now we're going to turn the details on and we're going to switch to the detail layer by selecting it so it says detail up here and we're just going to go and turn the bitmap layer back on as well so we've got several details we got these circles so basically we're going to come in and just draw circles right as best as you can figure out how to draw them to your best eyeball that you want so one there's two and there is three got a little bit of a shadow right here i'm not going to worry about that we've got a little box right in here so i think we're going to create that box it's got layer radius on the ends that might be noticeable so i'm going to draw another circle off that construction line i'll show you again because i know this is hard to see so i'm going to turn the bitmap layer off and show you what we have so far some bitmap layers off and you see i'm starting to build up some design in here so i'm going to turn that back on we are still in the circle mode and i don't need to be circle mode anymore now we've got a couple of lines to indicate other things so we got this little box right here and so that's going to be a detail as well i'm going to draw a line um i'm not going to draw a line yet well yes i will so we're going to draw a line using a polyline just come up here and generally follow the shape like we've been doing before space bar we'll do it again for this one come over to there and we're going to do this one here so this is going to be generally tangent so i'm going to pick a point that's almost tangent and i'm going to connect it to this circle now i'm going to hover over the circle and hit t and that just did a tangent line that attached to that circle so to see that we just detailed out one side of this thing and we did a tangent line so whenever you want to do a tangent you hover on the side of the circle you want your tangent to be at and you hit t on your keyboard that line will snap right to the tangent line of that circle let's keep going we're going to cut out the rest of the circle so we have half of our shape cut in there and it'll cut in there and now we are done with this guy now we can mirror it it was that quick now we we're gonna have to join vectors again but we now have half of our half of our jaws of life so i'm gonna select that but i don't want i've got to get into a point where i select it all but i don't want to select the green line we're going to go into mirror function select that and we need to flip about a line so we have to select this green line last so that was my bad so we're gonna so re-select we're gonna exit this re-select the jaws without selecting the green line then we're going to hold shift down and select the green line and now we go into mirror there's a little feature you're going to learn and we're going to have it flip about a line we're going to select that and what vectric knows that the last line you picked is the mirror line so we click that and now we have our jaws now we just need to join vectors we don't need this construction line anymore we're going to delete that we have all bunch of vectors to join so we got we're just working our way inside to out so i'm going to do the cut out right click join well we'll just join vectors for this i'm going to go over here and join vectors with a curve i'm clicking that twice then we're going to select this one and we're going to join vectors with a line select that twice we'll do that one join vectors with a line select that twice and we are good to go now so our choice of life are done that was pretty quick it's when we put the nozzle in that's going to be the issue it's going to be a little bit more tricky you have to get a little creative so first let's import the nozzle image so we're going to import a bitmap i already did a search for a nozzle that i wanted and there's this one right here and there it is and what i get to do is i've got two bitmaps on now we've got the nozzle bitmap and the badge bitmap i'm going to click the nozzle bitmap again i'm going to click it twice and then i'm going to drag it over to here now you can see right away it how do i fit that in there well i'm going to rotate that around like that and it looks like it's still too big so we have to shrink it down and we need to shrink it down some more now you can put anything you want in these things just to me the medical badge doesn't belong this is a fire department yes they do medical stuff but that's what we're going to roll with so we are going to do the import bitmap feature and then we're going to fix things up we could draw over this but it's going to be so diff complicated to do to draw vectors over we're going to take advantage of the bitmap trace feature but first we want to get on to the right layer so we're going to go to layers and go to icon layer get that active then we're going to go over to trace bitmap feature select it and now we have a nozzle so i want to just toy with the gray scale a little bit we want our nozzle to look good i mean it actually looks pretty good in this image here but i think it's going to come out a little funny let's okay that's better all right so i took out some of the questionable stuff and basically we're just going to come down we're going to preview we've got it looks good we're going to apply close and we're going to turn off our bitmaps and there is our nozzle all we have to do is a little doctoring up so we're going to take that out we're going to take some of this noise out so take that out and we'll add a few features to it to to because we have features here we want features over here as well so i'm going to take all these little bits and pieces out of the middle because there's just things that we don't want right now there's little cuts that vector put in there that are in our way and they don't do a lot okay so we've got that we've got that we've got that everything on the inside is gone you see we got a lot of noise on the handle here it's very easy to fix select the line hit node and just create a window come down to your lower left create a window going all the way up into the noise select a bunch of vectors and hit d and you will lose most of that but now this looks a little funny on the corner there so i'm going to control c control z and just change my location where i'm doing that at hit d again and i'm going to hover over this one and hit s and i have to select these two and hit s there we go so i changed our nozzle we'll get rid of that noise by hitting d we got a bunch of noise up here we hit d d we don't need so much of this stuff and then i'm going to select these two and hit s and pull this one out just a little bit so you see how we're doctoring this up as we move along and i think we're gonna delete that one so i'm gonna hover over that one and hit d and that one and hit d looking good looking good we got our finger grips over here i'm going to keep that and this is going to be kind of a weird line what i want to do is create a detail line in fact this is where it's time to start getting into our details this is a weird cut that's not going to work so we want to get rid of that so highlight those vectors and hit d and d and we've got net vectors i mean nodes we've got another one here we don't need d so let's take a look at our image bitmap okay so we have our handhold we've got this little element so we want this nozzle this nozzle lever to show up a little bit better so we have a node there that these little corner nodes we don't want them they're just weird little angle nodes this feature right here is not going to work for us we're going to draw an arc in there instead so we're going to just take those out control z we're going to get out of node mode by hitting escape and then we're going to select those guys and delete them oops ctrl z escape there we go delete and we're just going to take our curve line we're going to get on to our detail layer and then we're going to take draw a curve this is going on for a long time so i got to hand it to you for hanging out and we're just going to follow along a little ways to try to create this handle this snap is getting in the way so i'm turning my snaps off right there and we're just gonna click it around and i'm gonna hit space and i'm going to create another one right down there at the bottom of the lever space you'll see how this comes out in just a little bit and then we want this some of these features to show up here these these uh serrated features so i'm going to go to uh arc first i'm going to draw an arc and i'm going to start the arc right here to get the arcs into the nozzle end click right there we're not going all the way to the end we're just so these are enhancements to the drawings that we're making we're just working it our way around on all these areas and you'll see how this comes out it'll come out very cool and this helps make everything stand out just like it did in the jaws of life okay so i got several arcs in there i'm going to put another one right here and i want to show you what we have so far close i'm going to turn the bitmap off and now we're getting our nozzle built up so what i don't like is this line right here there's a something missing and it's it's a line coming across that way so we're gonna add a line there that goes just like this that follows along with the nozzle and just stop it right there now we got a little bumpy area right there we want to get rid of those nodes so we're going to get rid of a couple nodes delete delete delete they're a little more realistic we'll get rid of a couple more delete and delete all right that looks better now we've got the nozzle up here so what we're going to do is we are going to create an oval use the oval command and do our best to eyeball this oval so we're just going to create an oval shape we've got it we're going to escape from noble oval get that rotate it and i'll just put it in position and there's our oval now there's some serrations going around this thing do i want the serrations i don't know if we need the serrations but i'm going to get rid of them and we'll see how this feature looks if we need to add it or not i can already see it needs that character i'm not sure how to do that there's our nozzle i want to add one more thing a line right down here to distinguish the end of the knot the end of the handle and the start of the nozzle okay let's take a look all right i like this i think this this oval needs to be down a bit that looks good that looks good so we can we can put our we can what we can do is we can create little rectangles um i'm not sure i want to go through this if i was to make a full-blown which i will the the finished vector that i create will have these have these serrations in it so i'm going to leave it like that we are really close to this thing now let's uh turn all the layers on to our project so you can see what we're looking at now i mean basically all we're missing now is the text so at this point you've learned a lot a little process thinking there's some of the errors and you've even heard me get frustrated at it and how to place things in different layers so we're almost done designing this thing and then we're going to do our tool paths to show you how this looks when we're all said and done now i forgot something in here that we need to do i've got this long area here and if you remember in the beginning i said we got a circle right here so this cutout is going to come down to that circle so let's just get that taken care of we're going to go back to the body because that's where that's at and we're going to pick our center i'm zooming in because now we got a lot of things close to the center and i got to turn my snaps on and there we are and we're going to come out to that point which i'm going to assume is about right there and i want to make sure that my circle is on center so i exited out and clicked it twice and there's my little bead so that's looking good the circle's a little bit taller but that's okay you're going to turn the body off bitmap off and we're going to start trimming things away so i'm going to cut this out i'm going to cut that and that we have to do the same all the way around oops when you do something like that just ctrl z i try to do this in trying to find a a nice organized way to approach this when you're dealing with something that's got a lot of variation to it sometimes you have to just come back but it really helps to try to project what you're going to be doing in the beginning so i got out of cut mode now i'm deleting the rest of that circle that was left over around the drawing okay that looks better now what i can do i could have done was maybe do a pocket here but let's see what this thing's going to look like so what i'm going to do now is let's just generate a tool path and take a look i'm just thinking you know what i'm going to undo everything i just did because i want a pocket here so i'm going to ctrl z zz all the way back to this original point right here where everything comes back in so control z there we are back what i'm going to do is place a second ring in here that's going to leave a dead spot you'll see you'll see in just a moment i can't explain it until i actually do it so we're going to come back in on that corner and we're just going to come out there roughly there's good enough okay so we'll close that now and we're going to come back and cut all that out again to so we're going to cut out the inside inside outside outside outside outside yes that's it you will understand exactly what i'm doing in just a moment that just went backwards there there there there okay so now i should go back and delete this stuff whoo this is a long project well we're about at the end of the design phase where we get in the tool paths the last thing we have to do are put the words on this thing so i'm going to teach you how to put the words on there on a curve i'm going to teach you about a bug in vectric so you know how to get around that bug because otherwise you're gonna get frustrated when you put words on curves so let's dive in and get the words on there and by the way that file the vector file is gonna be available on etsy you can edit the words so you can put anything you want on them all right let's go we're going to put words up top and words on the bottom we're going to say madison fire department i'm going to create a circle start it on center and it's going to come out to there and i want that circle to be bigger a little bit bigger what i'm doing is i'm visualizing the text in here and how it's going to be balanced down so holding shift button down i'm grabbing that button and i made the circle bigger okay so now we go into our text mode and we're going to enter in madison let's see how this comes out so capitals madison and i am doing this with i'm going to do this with times new roman and i i want to keep something help you understand something start with times new roman because the other fonts do weird stuff so start with times new roman with what i'm doing and then get into selecting your font after you have it picked up so what we're doing is we're placing the font generally where it's going to be to see how it's going to fall into this pocket and it's still too big so we're going to shrink it down i have to close that and we're going to shrink it down to there now when this text wraps around it'll be about there and about there we're going to wrap this text right on that circle so we've got madison we're going to use this text on curb feature which is very very cool but first you have the text selected now you want to select the circle second and then hit text on curve bam there it is on the curve exactly how we don't want it to be this is where it gets a little screwy i haven't played with this enough to figure it out so just try some of your different settings i'm going to do above curve below curve now the text is upside down so we're going to try mode left okay that's not where it goes right left there's a way that we can get it to flip what it's doing okay so i'm getting close i'm grabbing a little green button to swing it down and we want this to go below the curve and left text on the other side i'm trying some different options there we go and then we go above the curve and there it is sometimes that takes a little work with that so we're going to swing it around not like that we're going to swing the text around by grabbing a little green button and we're just going to rotate it to where it looks good and i think we're about centered there okay see the letters are getting very close together so we need to separate that so we're going to close that and use the edit text spacing feature select that and what that's going to do when you select between the letters it's going to bring them together now if you hold your shift button down it'll take them apart so we're going to open up this gap a bit between these letters so our bit can make it through there and i'm going to close the gap on the n and on the o and that looks a lot more balanced and it's going to be able to work itself out a little bit now we just need to do department so we're going to select the text again oops we have to just click up here and start over and the madison was highlighted that's why i did that and we're going to say the caps locked fire department period and where's my text there it is and we're going to select that now that text is big right i want it to be roughly the same size but it's going to have to be a little smaller which i don't like because it just changes things a little bit and that means tighter tools so i think i'm going to take the decimal point out of that as well the period right here because it's going to be an added feature that i just don't need to mess with we know what fire department is close and i think that's going to work we'll use the text on curve feature again we have to select the circle and now put it up top and we are going to grab that and find that little green button and rotate it around and we want it to be on the other side of the curve so we're going to flip below curve so we got that selected and we're going to just swing our fire around until it is about what we want and i can go with that now we can change our font the reason is the font will be really skewed if you don't start off with new times or times new roman so i'm going to select let's try just arial so i'm going to type in a just put an a in and now i guess i'm going to have to scroll down to find the arial select it and there it is and then we're going to select in madison and go with ariel again and there that is it looks like madison is a little off to one side so i'm going to move it over just a little bit okay my friend just get rid of that circle and our badge is done all right we've finished the design i hope you've learned a whole bunch we're going to start getting into the tool paths now so you know how to like take this to the next level and actually complete the project but first i'm going to take a little break and i'm going to let a little break pop up so give me a chance to pee okay and when we come back we'll get into doing the tool paths you're doing awesome you're here you've been following along you've been picking up all these little tips i hope you've given me a thumbs up and a comment down below already and if you don't have router bits at this point if you like brand new to cnc i have the complete set that you need right that nobody out there has complete sets of router bits companies don't do that because they know that you're gonna have to buy them piecemeal anyway eventually and i thought you know it's i had the same problem so i figured i'm gonna solve that problem and i did so there's a link to a complete set of router bits down below and i'll give you some extra stuff files to start you off videos that train you how to work with the stuff get all the bells and whistles you know we don't need those big guys right okay i'm going to take that break and then i'll be back and we are going to take care of the tool paths okay we are back with we are now going to get into the tool paths i just want to make sure that i am off of pause all right this is where the fun begins now we get to create our stuff and how we're going to go through this tool path stuff so this is where a little more logic comes into mind what's the approach think about the bits you're going to be using so i know that in this project i see a problem you see this nozzle it comes very close to this pocket here and it will probably not pocket out remember i remember i have to fix that part right there so what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab this whole thing and just move it i have to grab it like that and we're just going to move it over a bit to get a little bit of space in there there we go that's better so we're going to take care of all our details first all these little lines and what have you so these the majority of them are going to be done with like a 60v bit we're going to come around here we're going to add these accent lines except for the rivets we're going to make them a little bit different we're going to pocket them a bit i think it's what we're going to do okay so that means we're going to work on that first we're going to take care of our v work first and then we're going to go into our other bits so we're going to go over to the tool path area by selecting this little arrow button a lot of people like to use the little pull out tab that shows up right here i don't because we're not in tool path mode we want to get into tool path mode so use this button right here to get the tool path mode now we're out of design mode and we are in tool path mode now let's get rid of all the other noise so we want to turn everything off this is now we don't have to worry about being on layers we just want to highlight the layers that we want to work with so i'm turning off everything except for our details and look at that so we've got a bunch of lines all around we got the rivets we have the the um little lines now these rivets uh the thing is this is so easy to do but the rivets are gonna make it a little bit of a problem so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna put the rivets on their own layer so we're going to select the rivets i'm going to hold shift down and select all the rivets i didn't really anticipate what i was going to be doing here until now so we can manage the rivets by themselves i've got them all selected right click move to layer add new layer called rivets enter okay now we're going to turn the rivets off uh just click off we're going to turn the rivet layer off which is down at the bottom we don't need that now we just have the detail there on where to select everything and we're going to go into our the profile tool path because all we're going to do is draw our scribe lines we select that and we'll do this with a 60v bit 60 is good for your general detail uh finer detail so 60 is actually already selected and we're going to make our depth very shallow it's going to be a .03 and we want to make sure everything is on the line and that's all we need come down here and we're going to name this detail and we're going to put 60d in there that way we know what bit we're using and we're going to calculate and now we have a scribe there well the first thing we want to do is color the lines so we're going to color them black so you select this tool path color and then select this little drop down feature and select the color that you want and then we're going to run the tool path and there it is so it doesn't jump out at you right now but it will jump out at us later it'll add to this whole thing let's do a split screens because now we have to select some other things so we're going to select the next bit and the next bit is going to be we're going to work with an eight inch bit no i'm going to work with a let's turn on some layers for a second we're going to turn on our bitmap for a moment i want to see what we're going to work with so we're going to use the quarter inch bit to pocket out everything then we're going to switch over to an eighth inch bit now we're gonna have to go back to a quarter inch bit to do our cut out so we're going to do our pocketing first of our rivet holes and then we're going to go pocket the other elements now we can put the rivet holes with these pockets i could have done that but it didn't so we're going to turn that image back off we're going to turn everything off and we're going to turn rivets on there's our rivets so i'm going to come back over to the tool path area close that we're going to go to pocket mode i don't know if the quarter inch bit will work on this but we're going to try it and we're going to select our bit so we're going to remove the eighth inch bit and select a quarter inch bit and we're going to go up 0.1 deep and go with that we'll leave it set on offset and we're going to call this rivets and one a quarter e m for a quarter inch end mill and we're going to calculate and it says nothing selected so i have to go in and select all the rivets and then we're going to calculate and we're going to run the tool path and the rivets showed up we're going to color the rivets so we can see them we're going to color them black as well there are our rivets excellent okay rivets are done now the next one is the big pocket so we're going to turn off the rivets we're going to turn on our pocket and our detail and the reason we're going to turn on details as well i'm sorry not details icons icons are going to be boundaries inside that we don't want to carve around so we're going to go with that we're going to select everything and we're going to select the pocket command again now here we are going to need to add a bit we're gonna have to do a bit change the reason is is because i'll show you why we're gonna go with a quarter inch and we'll go a point one deep and we'll stay in offset and we're going to call this pocketing one over quarter em calculate nothing let's see this is ignoring unusable open vector so i have open vector somewhere let's see where they're at okay so the open vector was here the open vector it shows up immediately when we do something like this so we have to go back into our drawing to fix that now you see all this all this is tool path markings that's in there we want to turn that back off and we got to fix this one drawing thing so this little icon right here is called toggle tool path hit that and it goes away now we've got to deselect and find that guy and there it is that's why we have to have closed vectors so we're going to select the other one we are going to right click and join vectors with a line and we're going to do that one more time okay it's good it's grayed out right there so we're going to go back into that tool path let me zoom out and we're going to hold our shift button down and select that bit that tool that jaws of life and we are going to calculate once again now we're going to run the tool path let's change the color to red like it is in the image you'll see why look at that we are getting very close so we have our hatchet layover we've got our hatchet separation we have our line there we've got our details here and we've got our details carving up through here then we have our details here but you see there's an issue right there there's an issue right here and there's an issue right there and same with the hatchet handles and the jaws of life there's a couple of ways we can handle this we can make them a little smaller or we're going to add in a second bit now there's something i missed the lettering right so that makes this we've got to do some work still yeah this happens to me too that's why we want to plan ourselves out in advance so uh we can kind of catch ourselves as we move along this is very detailed right so yeah we just missed stuff that's why vectric is such an amazing software it shows you when you're missing stuff now with this display the tool path display um yeah okay let's keep going put the words back in so i can cut this out right all right so let's turn on the text and see why the text didn't show up uh where is the text i got to find out where the text is at so i think i've got it on okay it's on body so we have to move that text so we're going to just click the text shift click the text right click move to the text layer now we're going to turn the body layer off we're going to now we have everything again but we still have this issue here we're going to solve that by doing this we have to go back into the tool path reselect everything with the text and because we have these sections here and we're going to have it with the text as well in fact i'll show you i'm just going to rerun that now we have some text selected it's almost the end of april and it's snowing outside by the way okay we want to reset this drawing and preview all tool paths so you see fire department didn't come out very nice madison didn't come out very nice this stuff didn't come out very nice so we're gonna have to go back in there and do a bit add a bit so this little box here we're going to select and we're going to select the smaller bit we're going to select the 1 8 end mill and we're going to rerun this now what it's going to do is going to run the quarter inch and then the eighth inch so it's going to be a bit change we don't like to do that but that's part of doing all this stuff we're going to rerun this tool path we'll rerun all of them and we have changed the color on that so highlight that and make that color red as well and now the fire department looks good we have separation right here we can see our handle we can see madison there's a little bit of an issue in the lettering there so we'll probably have to upsize the lettering there's no more separation there the hatchet handles are in good shape this is going to take a while to run of course the whole intention is to teach you how to think about this let's take care of the last thing which is the body so i'm going to select that oh we got one more thing we've got these uh pockets there too so that was called uh no what layer did i have them on i got them on the body layer a lot of thinking to do with this stuff so i'm going to select that that that and that oh i wasn't holding my shift button down uh i have to go back into the pocket layer first so we got to go back into the pocketing and now we have to select hold shift button down and select those with it and then we can rerun it again and run it run all the tool paths and there it is looking good okay let's let's do the outline so now we're going to close that we're going to go into profile i'm going to select that and we're just going to select the outer profile we're going to change it to outside we're going to profile it with a quarter inch i'd actually rather do this with a 3 16. so i'm going to do it with a 3 16 inch why would i go to that is because i can get a little more detail and it's still a strong bit and we're going to change the depth of cut to z equals which is the thickness of the material and we're going to call this cutout and that's going to be 3 over 16 end mill and calculate and we're going to run that tool path and there's our fire emblem so the only other thing i need to do to make this available is to i'm going to upsize these letters you can still edit them and you can change them by going into the text mode and i'm going to add these little features on the nozzle and i think that's what i'm going to do so the question at this point in this recording has been going on for almost two hours so i'm going to stop instead of importing this onto a flag okay that's it i was going to actually show you how to put this on like a flag but that's another hour and a half we're not going there i want a beer by now okay if you're brand new with cnc routers then sign up this channel because i teach all the basics about the cnc routers the design software vectric software or the concepts right you don't have to use vectric but the concepts of how to walk through this kind of process they're brand new uh you don't know what router bits you need there's a link down below for that complete kit with free files and what else this vector file it's available on etsy and uh yeah go down take a look at all the links and i just want to let you know i'm getting contacted by companies all the time okay i guess because i'm getting a little more popular on youtube they want me to sell their stuff so you give me all these discounts i'm going to pass them directly on to you if you're on the list because you get first dibs when you're on a list that's it subscribe and everything else down below this is garrett i will talk to you next time happy cnc

Channel: CNC Routers, Beginners & Beyond - Garrett Fromme

Views: 10,683

Keywords: how to design with bitmaps, vectric bitmaps, vectric, vcarve, aspire, bitmap tracing, vcarve bitmap tracing, aspire bitmap tracing, bitmap tracing vectric, how to use bitmap tracing, bitmap, trace bitmap, vector tracing, vectric trace bitmap, vcarve trace bitmap, aspire trace bitmap, vectric vcarve desktop, bitmaps, how to convert bitmap to vector, how to trace bitmaps, fire fighter vector file, firefighter vector

Id: UDEWIqMQuEA

Length: 119min 52sec (7192 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021