How To Carve Any Image On A CNC - Making The Vectric Toolpath Tutorial

in this tutorial we're going to go over how to get a detailed engraving from any image using a vectric program and an i2r CNC so let's get started best recommendation for starting out with something like this is to get a high contrast image so that just means having no mid-tones just having full black and full white as your options so for this example I'm using a king of hearts playing card image but I just looked up King of Hearts black and white and I found one that's full black and full white so if you'd like to use that one you can use that image as well otherwise just grab whatever other full contrast image that you'd like so first step is you're going to open up your vectric program set your dimensions that's going to be based off of whatever material that you're using so it might be a bit different than me I'm just doing three inches by 4.2 inches set your Z zero position I recommend doing material surface for Engravings just because it gives you a lot more accurate reference of where the surface of your material is and then everything else is just personal preference so now that you have your project go up into file and then do import and import bitmap that will open up your finder window where you can select the image that you have downloaded once you select that it'll Auto Import into your project and you'll notice that you can tell whether it's selected or not based off whether it Grays itself out when it's kind of grayed out that means it's deselected when it's full contrast that means that you have it selected also make sure that this is a high quality image you can tell just by zooming in that this one is fairly high quality it's definitely not super pixelated and that just helps translate to vectors A lot more easily so make sure it's selected and then Mouse over to the left of your screen under create vectors you'll see a little bird image that's the trace bitmap feature so when you click on that you'll open up a window that gives you two options at the beginning it's either color or black and white so you'll notice with color it gives you a lot of different tones it's a bit weird since this is a full black and white image it's kind of making up for some things but if you were using something with multiple colors that's how you'd select individual colors that you want to isolate for Vector outlines but for this purpose just do black and white that slider on the bottom is the sensitivity so it's what is registered as black and what is registered as white you'll see that if I bring it all the way to the max it auto fills a lot of the white as black so you just want to find a happy medium and you can tell by what's black in the outline of where your setting is once you get that set correctly scroll down and you can hit preview just to see what the automatic features are and what it's going to outline this one did a pretty good job of following the lines when you zoom up close don't freak yourself out if it's not exactly along the outline you have to remember that a lot of this is getting translated to an organic piece of material so you're not going to get infinite detail anyway but as long as it's along the lines and it looks right when you zoom out you should be fine so for something like this here this little square that's just noise created by some of the pixels and it might mess up or prolong your cut unnecessarily so you can change that by the second option you see in this lower section noise filter right now it's only set to 2 pixels but if we Crank that up a bit and then preview again you'll notice that that small square goes away so that's just a great feature for really cleaning up some of your traces after that you can just do a general scan of your image to make sure that everything's translating well to vectors and that you don't have any big issues if there are some cornering issues you can always clean that up with node editing but it seems like that's not going to be necessary for this design one thing you can try to clean up beforehand is to use the corner fit option so that just defines how tightly your vector is going to go along the pixels if you crank it all the way up to tight you'll get very rigid lines which isn't great because a lot of this is a very curved surface so we want to keep it kind of in the middle if not more towards the loose side once you're happy with all your settings you can click apply and that will bring you out back to your editing window and you'll notice you now have a vector outline of your object with the vector outline selected open up your tool paths and you're just going to make a vcarve toolpath as you would any other toolpath So based off what bits you have that's going to Define what settings you do here I'm using a 30 degree v-bit just because it's going to give me a lot tighter detail than a 60 degree or a 90 degree v-bit and I might choose to use clearance tools just to save me some time in bigger sections like the hearts next to the head or something like that but it's not necessary so once you have the settings the way that you want them to be just make sure that you label your tool path correctly and then press calculate and you'll see the preview screen pop up preview your tool path just to make sure everything's looking good you'll notice there are a lot of those little lines that's due to the step over but there's not much you can do to eradicate those in the preview and you'll notice when you cut those don't actually show up because of how minuscule they are if you're satisfied with your preview then you're going to go ahead and save your tool path as you would any other from there you just run the toolpaths as you would anything else on your CNC one tip I can give you is for detailed Engravings like this I definitely would recommend considering what kind of wood you're using and how you Orient the wood so at first I tried a face grain carving on a piece of maple for this cut and it was a bit too detailed and I got a lot of blowout and chip out so then I tried just flipping the same piece of maple up to be end grain instead of face grain and that was able to retain the details a lot better so things to think about when you're doing detailed Engravings like this and honestly after I did the end grain I'm very pleased with the results and has very finite details so if you have any ideas for v-carves like this or converting any images put them in the comments make sure that you follow for more tips and I can't wait to see what you guys make have a good one

Channel: i2R CNC Global

Views: 357,921

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Id: sv9vbmvexJc

Length: 6min 3sec (363 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2022