How To Design CNC Projects The RIGHT Way [Vectric Tricks You Never Knew Existed] - Garrett Fromme

hi i'm garrett with idc woodcraft and you have come to the right video if you were trying to learn vectric this video is going to take you to the next level of design this is a step-by-step from concept to completion of an american flag and what we're going to do is we're going to take a flag we're going to put an emblem on it but we're going to break it down into its constituent components and organize all our stuff up front to make our life a lot easier this is an order of operations video but you are going to get a lot more than you ever anticipated because you are going to learn so many tips and tricks in the vectric software that even vectric doesn't teach this is a long video but i can promise you you are going to learn more than you would if you watched 50 hours of youtube and 15 hours of vectric because you're going to learn some stuff that you didn't even know existed so we're going to dive into vectric i'm going to show you what we're going to do and now we're going to dive in and start doing it so let's go this is what we're going to be designing today this american flag with the eagle on it so the way we're going to do this is we're going to break it down into its constituent components the banner the stripes the eagle and the entire body and we're going to build it up based on its ratios and then make it to the size that we want i'm going to show you how to color everything and one of the things you're going to learn is how to do the stars in this type of fashion it's very tricky and then you're going to learn about v-carving in a very different way and one of the things that you're really going to pick up is how to eliminate funny v-cuts and v-grooves but here's one of the little special features that most people don't know is this flat bottom in the v grooving this eagle is a v-groove but we have a flat bottom in it so i'm going to show you exactly how to do that and you are going to learn so many little tips and tricks that it's going to blow you away you will absolutely be at the next level so let's get started on this design and by the way if you are interested i have this vector available on etsy the link is down below in the description and you can just follow with the second half of the video how to set it up with the tooling with the router bits get the tool path set up right all right so let's uh take off with this first thing i did was go to google and typed in american flag dimensions there's lots of results but this is the one that i found that has what i want so american flags have specific ratios as far as the dimensions go and that's what we're going to be working with but i want to just dissect the flag a little bit the overall height of the flag is called the hoist and the length of the flag is called the fly so i'll be using those terms a bit and then of course we have the stars we've got the the union we've got everything's got dimensions that keeps everything in ratio and that's what this table tells us here so as you're building the flag you're going to refer back to your table as you construct it and the first element of this flag is the overall size the hoist and the fly but the one that i want you to understand is we are going to be working with ratios so i'm going to be working in inches but it doesn't matter if you're working in millimeters miles feet kilometers everything's built in ratio so we are going to be using ratios and then we'll expand the flag to the size that we want so we're going to go into vectric and we're going to open up a project and our project size is gonna be 24 inches by 24 inches by three quarters of an inch thick we're going to go off the top of the material and we're going to be in the lower left corner we're going to select okay so we are going to create this flag in four elements that means we want four layers to work on so the first thing we're going to do is create the layers right now we have one single layer so i'm just going to go right down here to add new layer and i'm just going to add three more layers one two three and then we're going to go in and name the layers so i'm clicking layer number one i'm going to click it again and i'm going to call this flag body and we're going to layer number two and we're going to call that stripes layer number three we're going to call that union and layer number four is going to be eagle in fact we need a fifth layer we want the stars i think i'm going to put the stars in our own layer so we're just going to add that and enter stars so when you start off on a project you want to try to dissect it before you actually start so you can create your layers and it'll save you a lot of effort later now the features we're going to be working with are creating rectangles and rectangular arrays and then we're going to be using the offset function cut and a couple other functions now we're going to go into the tool paths to show you how to set those up first thing we want to do is create the body of the flag so we want to be on that layer and so we're going to switch over to that layer and now you can see up top it says flag body so we are on it so we're going to get the dimensions of the flag body and we're going to go over to our dimension here so the hoist is one inch tall or one tall and the fly is 1.9 wide since i'm going to be working in inches that's the numbers i'm going to be using so we're going to go back to vectric and we're going to go into rectangle right here and the first thing we want to set is where our pick point is going to be we're going to build this from the lower left corner or the zero point right down here and and build the flag to the right and up so that means we need to select the lower corner of this rectangle now the dimensions right here don't matter to us because they would matter if we wanted to have the rectangle be be placed in a specific location without us actually going out and picking it but we can just go in and pick the location so these numbers are irrelevant and then we want to make sure we're set on square corners and now we're going to enter in our dimensions so our width is 1.9 and our height is one and we're going to come over to the corner of the flag and if you watch my cursor right now there's a rectangle over it and it's in a little plus where the cursor is and the minute it grabs that corner the cursor changes to a bullseye now one of the things you want to have on are your snap features up here so it'll will snap to those corners i click it and there is our first rectangle now the first thing you see is that's an awfully small rectangle for a flag so what we're going to be doing is building the flag and then we'll expand it to the size that we want the next thing we're going to do is build the union so we're going to change our layer to a union now the union has a dimension and it of course is in the upper left corner so we want to reference that corner and build to the right and down so that means we need to change our pick box up here to the top now let's go get the union dimensions so we're going to go back over and the union height is 0.5385 and the length or the width is 0.76 so we'll go back to our drawing and our width is 0.76 and our height is 0.5385 and we're going to come and let our pick box grab that little corner right there on the upper left of the flag and click it and there is our union okay so we've done the body of the flag and the union and you've learned a bit about rectangles and how to place them specifically where you want them with the right size and using ratios on the flag now we're going to get into the stripes and we're going to do a little bit with what's called rectangular arrays but we're also going to modify these stripes in a way so it shows up on the flag even better so let's dive into the stripes and show you how that's done so now we have the union now we want to do our stripes so we are going to go back to our layers and switch to stripes our stripes are now highlighted up here so now we need to get the dimensions of our stripes we know the stripes go the entire length of the flag so that's going to be a 1.9 we just need to get the height now so we're going to go back over to the website and the stripes height is l so we look at that and it's .0769 back to vectric open up our rectangle and we're going to start our stripe at the lower left corner here so we're going to change our pick box up here and now we're just going to set our width and our height so our width is 1.9 and our height is 0.0769 [Music] and then i'm going to select the lower corner and there is our stripe now if you want to create white stripes and red stripes create a separator we're going to do something in fact that's what we're going to do so instead of having this where there is no red stripe we're going to actually put red stripes in but we want a divider between the white stripes and the red stripes so we are going to go into this and we're going to do a little bit of an offset on our stripe where we're going to create a second rectangle on the inside so down here in offset and layers we're going to pick the first item which is called offset and we want this to offset on the inside so we're going to select inside and then we are going to pick our numbers so we have a number of 0.0769 so this has to be kind of a small number so we're going to do this up 0.01 and let's see what happens so now the rectangle has to be selected while we're doing that we picked that and i think that will look pretty good you got to remember there's going to be another one up above it and it's actually going to i think it's going to be a little wide here so i'm going to control z that and i'm going to change that to .008 and apply so we will roll with that now what i'm going to do is select that rectangle and i'm going to close this i'm going to go into the rectangular array which is down in offset and layer layout it's the second button and i'm going to select that and now you can see this item is selected so we want to offset this at the proper distance now when i say we're going to copy it upward and we want to offset it so it's evenly spaced so we need to use the number that's going to space it evenly which is the width of the true stripe that would be from this point to this point and that was that 0.0769 so we know that we have 13 stripes and we're going to run them up this way that means they're going to be going up in a column we need one column and 13 rows rows are always side to side and columns are always up and down so it'd be one column 13 rows and our distance in y right here is going to be 0.0769 and we want to be on offset if you have gap selected it's going to come out a little funny we just want it to offset by the amount here and we want 13 copies of it so we are good to go with that we're going to come down and select copy and now we have our 13 stripes and we have boundaries between them so we can do red and white stripes so now we have our whole flag but we want to do something here we want to get rid of this first rectangle that we drew so we're going to just going to click it and delete it and then a couple other things i want to do here as well is i want to round out some corners here this is going to be a pretty sharp flag but we will take care of that in a little bit one of the first things we have to do right now is get rid of the stuff inside of the union and we need to close off what we cut away now i'll show you what i mean first thing i'm going to do is turn off the layer with the outside boundary that's the flag body so we click that and that turns off and we're going to be cutting the stripes so we want to make sure we're on the stripes layer if we are not if we're on a different layer whenever we cut something that'll put the objects that are remaining on that new layer so we're on stripes and we're going to close this and go over to the cut feature and also do is hold my left mouse key down while i'm inside the union and just drag right on across those rectangles and now we have are pretty much basically our flag but we still have a lot of work to do now i'm going to close this and i want to turn off the union now because i want to see what my stripes look like so you see what's going on here our stripes are open vectors we need to close those vectors up so what we're going to do is grab the polyline tool and click that and we're going to grab this corner of the top line and we're going to come down and grab the corner of the bottom line of the open vector and then we're going to hit escape and now we have a line going up there and we're going to grab our cut tool again and we're going to come in and just cut each one of these out just like that i'm gonna escape to turn off the cut feature and there we are now we are if i if you look at that i click it it clicks it as one vector i want to show you something in the cut feature so i'm going to click it again and right down here is a check mark and that check mark says when we exit the cut feature it's going to connect the new loose vectors to whatever vectors it can and that meant that it's going to connect each one of these lines to the rest of the rectangle so we are set to go with that so our stripes are done our basic flag is done now it's time for the stars stars this one's going to be a little tricky to explain but it's a lot of fun to do and once you get the concept you're gonna get it we're gonna dive a little deeper into rectangular arrays so we get those stars placed in the staggered fashion that they are on the flag so you're gonna learn a whole new level of how to do this kind of thing so let's get back to it the first thing we want to do is turn the stripes off so we're going to go up to layers and turn the stripes off we're going to turn the eagle off we'll leave the stars turned on and we're going to go to the union and turn that on and when we're going to click the stars so we are working on that layer and you know that when you see stars right up here so stars are a funny thing we have to use a rectangular array but we have to use some interesting features here and it's going to be a little challenging for me to explain to you why it's going to work the way it is but if you follow along i think you'll pick this up the first thing we want to do is understand how our stars are placed so what i'm going to do is i'm going to find out where the first star shows up in this lower left corner so we're going to go back to our dimension and we see down here there's a number e and when i go over here the e is 0.054 so the first star starts from the bottom of the union of 0.054 and it goes inward with the g so the g is 0.063 0.063 i'm writing it down as we go so i'm going to go back to the flag and i'm going to create a rectangle to create my placement so i went into the rectangle mode i'm going to be building a rectangle from this corner of the union so i want to be in the lower corner here and i'm going to again ignore these numbers here because i'm just going to pick the corner and my width was 0.063 and my height was 0.054 so our rectangle is set i'm going to let the cursor grab that corner and click and that is where our first star starts now for a moment it looked a little funny but my numbers are correct so so the first star is going to be placed right at this corner but we want to know how big the star is so you get to learn another feature this is cool i'm going to close out of this i'm going to go back to the flag and i want to find out what the diameter of the star is so there's an indicator right here and that's k and the diameter of the star is .0616 so we're going back into vectric and we're going to open up the star and the first thing we want to do is make sure we have five points on our star which we do and we're going to work with the diameter of the star which is right here but now it says outer radius so we only know the diameter so we have to divide this by 2 and the way you divide a number by two is in highlight the field so all the numbers are copied and we'll go .0616 divided by two and press the equals button and that's going to give our star radius now when we select that corner our star is anatomically correct so i'm going to escape and i'm going to delete that box our first star is in place now we have to put our 50 stars in that i want to show you with the star you know that these stars are offset for every line that they go down and they're offset for um every row and every column so this is where it gets a little screwy we are going to use the array rectangular array and we already have our two dimensions we have the o63 going side to side and the o54 up and down let's go back into vectric and we're going to select our star and then we're going to go into the rectangular array feature once again at this time we're going to use columns and rows so first thing we want to know is how many columns and how many rows do we have so we're going to the flag and count them so the columns up and down are 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 and the rows one two three four five six seven eight nine back to vectric in columns we're going to enter eleven and in rows we're going to enter nine this is where we have to tell vector to do something kind of interesting first of all we have our base dimension of 0.054 up and down and .063 side to side so we're going to enter that in right here and we're going to stay in the offset mode so for x side to side it's 0.063 and our y up and down is 0.054 but now we have to tell vector to offset these so this is where this feature comes in handy so we want our x as it goes up we want the x to offset by 0.063 again it's really hard to explain why this does what it's going to do but i just i have to do this so the y is a 0.054 and the reason is is because that's the stagger we go 0.054 up and over and then 0.05 down and over again and that's what we're telling it to do right here so i'm going to back this out just a little bit and click copy and that's going to place all of our stars but we obviously have too many stars so what we're going to do is escape and we're just going to highlight the stars in the boundary and same thing here i'm going right i'm sorry left to right so that means only the things that are fully enclosed in the pick box are going to be selected and i delete that and now we have 50 stars so this it's a little weird to try to explain why this happens that way but our offset basically again is we are staggered up and over the same dimension down and over the same dimension so that's what we're typing into this box right here to get our offset now when you're fiddling with it it's probably going to take you a little bit of time to start to really grasp it and you'll probably have as hard of a time to explain it as i will in layman's term where you can understand it if you get it then put down in the comments clear as mud so i'm going to close that and i'm going to turn on some layers now i'm going to turn on our flag body and our stripes and look at that we have an american flag so if we go to machine this out right now it's going to be kind of cool but i'm not going to machine it yet what we want to do is now let's get our size so i'm going to select the whole thing and then click it again and now we have our bubbles showing up and we are going to grab the inner corner bubble right here but we're going to zoom out so we can get this thing to size the way we want to and i'm just going to stretch it out and we're going to stretch it out some more i'm going to go almost the full 24 width of the board not quite though so that's about the size we're going to be working with this is pretty cool so let's get this centered up and we're going to center dead smack in the middle of our project piece here so we're going to select the align selected objects button that is under transform objects you select that and all you have to do is hit this middle white button right here and it's going to move everything into center so we are looking good we're going to close that down well we've been hanging together for about a half an hour now i'm kind of feeling like you're my buddy actually you probably are by now hey you have learned so much at this point rectangles and arrays and how to stagger the stars to get them the way you want how to plan your projects up front and yeah if you feel like you've learned more than you have in the last 20 hours of youtube give me a thumbs up what we're going to be doing now is get into the fun stuff so now what we're going to do is put an eagle on that flag what you're going to learn is how to grab a logo turn it into a bitmap get that bitmap traced and then fix all the nodes so you don't have really screwy cuts i don't know if you've done v-carves before but if you have and you're going why am i getting these weird lines of weird places you're going to learn exactly why and how to prevent that from happening and you're going to learn how to place a logo in the flag and do something really special that you had no idea that you could do you're gonna love this part so without further ado after your pee break and my pee break we're gonna jump back into this it's time to get our fourth element in here the eagle's head so when you do this you can use any vector that you want you're just going to have to do some doctoring up and i'm going to show you an interesting way to doctor up your vectors really quick because if you don't do this you're going to have problems in your carb it's not going to be clean so the first thing is i'm going to import the eagle so we're going to come up here to bitmap import bitmap under file operations click that and then you're going to go get your vector wherever it may be and mine is right here it's this eagle's head so i'm going to double click it and it's going to pop in right in the middle pretty cool eagles head so i'll just let you know i paid 60 dollars for this vector i could have bought it for four but obviously i'm gonna go for the higher price now actually i paid sixty dollars because that was the license fee for me to be able to sell this in any way shape or form like in a project so i'm going to put this vector on etsy so if you don't want to do the design work but you want to do the tool path work then you can pick that up there will be a link down below all right so first thing i'm going to do i select the vector so i had my bubbles here and i'm going to expand it now i'm going to hold the shift button down so everything stays pretty much on center i just want to get an idea about how big i want to expand this eagle's head so we're pretty good size i'm going to use my cursor button to start to move it to the right i almost want to put this eagle across the union a bit so i'm going to see it the reason people don't do that very much is because it interferes with the stars and it's hard to work around the stars in a v curve let's see if i can do it so i could do it like this right here i could even maybe turn the eagle's head a little bit i think it would leak kind of cool centered up here let's just take a look and see so i'm going to rotate the eagle's head just a little so i can do a little more jaw on it where it's away from this star and this star but i can delete this star and that star so you can see it's pretty close right there i'm not sure this is going to work i'm going to move it over if it wants to move there it goes and i'm going to rotate it a little bit more oops select it again so the computer's a little slow with this vector i'm not sure why and so i'm not i'll tell you what i'm going to do i'm not going to do this so you understand how to do this yourself so this is kind of the easy way okay so just controls in until i get it back and now we're going to move it over to the middle right here and i want to get it centered up appropriately on this actually it's pretty good spot right there this is where it's going to get really really cool in this whole project you're gonna think this is definitely cool all right so we have the eagle uh not just cool you're going to learn a ton in this little step alone so first thing i'm going to do is turn off all my layers except for the eagle but i'm going to leave the eagle layer on i'm going to turn it on and now you can see it is turned off because it's red but it's active i'm going to just click that light bulb so it's on and this is where we're going to put the vector so we're going to select the eagles head and go use the trace bitmap which is this little guy right here under create vectors it's kind of like a paper airplane looking thing we're going to click that and vectric is going to turn us into a grayscale type of model and if you don't like the grayscale sometimes if you're working with a picture some things are a little shaded out you can go to this threshold button right here and adjust it up and down and get the effect that you like however i like this it's going to pick it up so i'm just going to do preview down at the bottom and just place the vectors i'm going to apply it and i'm going to close it and now we're going to go up and to the layers and i'm going to turn off the bitmap and there is our eagle so it doesn't look a lot like an eagle right there but this will end up looking like the image that you just saw but there's a couple problems in here and you're going to run into this often when you're doing vector tracing bitmap tracing so what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn on the node mode by pressing the n on the keyboard and you know you're in node mode when you look at the cursor itself and it's an arrow without the tail and we're going to select one of our vectors now you see that there are a lot of black vectors when you go to do a v carve and you have black nodes in here what is going to happen is every time it's the the program or when when it generates a program and it sees that node the tool it programs it in a way that the router bit is going to pull out a little bit and so it's going to leave a lot of corners and edges all along your v-carb and it's not going to look very good so what we want to do is turn all these into smooth nodes right now they're corner nodes effectively they are the same nodes that you would find in a rectangle now i'm going to show you what i mean i select a rectangle and i'm just going to draw a rectangle and i'm going to now go to node mode while well i have to escape that i'm going to hit n and you see there's black corners if you do a v carve on this the v bit is going to come out of the corner of the of the box to make it look like there's a sharp corner all the way down and that's the effect that you will get all over this project if you do not smooth out your nodes so deleted the box i hit n again to get back in node and i am selecting that so here's how we fix this really quick instead of going into each node and trying to fix it up you select the line and highlight i'm sorry you select the line and you just select all of your lines like that i'm holding my shift button down and i have now selected oh you have to not cross over into ones that are already selected and we have every one of these selected now lightning fast now you just come over to your left or your right and you're going to encompass the whole thing and all your nodes are going to turn like a gray color a grayish red and you hit the letter s on your keyboard and what that does is it smooths every single node so i hit s and now we have nothing but blue nodes across the whole board so i'm going to hit shift while i'm in node i'm going to come over and select everything and you see there's not a single black node in here now sometimes it might get a little goofy on you might want to come in and check your corners because sometimes what was a corner will now be like a big bubble and you don't want that so we're good to go so this deal with the nodes that we just covered is going to be your godsend when it comes to having good carbs you learned a trick that nobody uses until now so that was cool but you think that's cool wait to see what we're going to get into now now i'm going to show you how easy it is to put a boundary around a vector that has lots of vectors in it like the eagle's got the beak and the eye and the the feathers and all those are separate vectors but we're going to put a boundary around that in a very simple way and you're going to love this so let's dive in we're going to create an outline where the stripes will not come close to the eagle so it'd be just kind of a border all the way around the eagle and the way you do this is by using the offset command which is right here in offset and layout it's the first button select that then you're going to select all your outer boundary items nothing on the inside so i'm just gonna from the right i'm gonna click and drag over to the left and so i have every outer boundary item selected except for the beak now i have to stop because i almost made a booboo we're going to come up and create a new layer for this boundary so then you'll understand why in just a moment so i just go up to layers i'm going to add new layer and i'm going to call it eagle boundary and we're going to change the color of the eagle while we're at it so we can tell the difference between things so i click the little black box there and pick the color that i want i'm choosing red so we are on layer eagle boundary now we are going to select all the outer items so i click i'm just going to drag across down below nothing on the inside selected i just have to pick the beak so i have to hold the shift key down and select that and now we just want to figure out how far out do we want this boundary to be created and i'm going to go with half an inch 0.5 and i hit offset right here then it's an offsetting failed check vectors and that's because it's set up on the inside i want this on the outside right here now i do it again and it creates a boundary all the way around see that it closed all the vectors now it did create some stuff on the inside this is why i wanted to create the separate layer so i could turn the eagle off and get rid of whatever pops up in the middle so that's done so that looks kind of a weird shape we are going to run into this issue again with the vectors or the nodes i'm going to close this and i selected that box i'm going to hit n and you see we've got a bunch of black nodes again so alls we're going to do is select everything and we're going to smooth it so we're going to hit s and now we have all smooth nodes with that one little trick i'm sure that you are going ooh i can do something and if that was good and you haven't done it by now give me a thumbs up and maybe a comment comments always help my channel that's why i ask for them it gives youtube like that engagement boost hey just so you know while we're here i source router bits so if you're brand new and you really don't know what router bits you want you can go to my website idcwoodcraft.com or the link down in the description below where you can see what router bits i have i sell them in sets for beginners because nobody sells sets like i do and you'll get a bunch of extra perks when you buy them also if you are interested in webinars things like that sign up to my email list you'll get emails to know what i'm putting on webinars for beginners and for entrepreneurs speaking of entrepreneurs you might want to join the cnc entrepreneur's facebook group our mission is to help each other make money with our cnc routers so yeah a little intermission here huh all right so now we're gonna get into putting the stripes back into the eagle where we're gonna use that boundary to as stop points for the stripes so the eagle pops out this is just so cool i love teaching you this stuff especially when nobody else teaches it so let's get in and get these stripes all fixed up so now we're going to switch our layer to stripes and we're going to turn stripes on so it says stripes up at the top and we are going to now use our snipping tool i want to take a look right here so it kind of comes up it doesn't quite touch right up there i don't think that's going to be an issue i'm just thinking of aesthetics there's going to be a few weird spots down here but we'll work with that in a little bit what we want to do is get everything out of the middle first so we're going to grab our scissors and we are simply just going to start cutting everything away so i'm going to hold the left mouse button down while i'm up here at the top and i'm just going to drag it down now if you cross over something you don't want to cut out then just ctrl z until it's all back i'm going to do it here i'm going to do it here here over here here and down here so it looks like we got a little crossover right here as well um okay so that's part of the next thing so we do want to get rid of that line that's because that's what we're doing now the next thing we want to get rid of are all the segments in between because what we want to do is create a single closed boundary here like a vector in the in the stripe rectangle and we're not going to have that so long as this whole thing is still connected to itself so i just want to take a look at that little loop there that might be an issue i'm not sure so what we're going to do is now we're going to cut everything in between each stripe i'm going to speed up so i can take care of that unless i run into an issue then i'll slow this back down okay so you see a little spot right here looks just kind of goofy that's going to be noticeable on the flag when it's done so we're going to fix that let's just keep trimming all this out because we want to take care of our trimming first and then we'll do our aesthetic work yeah i was uh debating on this eagle thing for a little bit because it was a little pricey 60 bucks but you know i want to do it the right way and oh we forgot to get that line on the inside there so we got rid of that line there and we are going to need to cut that out and we need to cut this one and so we are set so there's a little bit of goofy stuff going on up in here and what do i want to do with this um i think we're going to be okay so this little spot here that would be part of one of the stripes on the inside we're going to leave it as it is right now and we're going to go up and fix this vector so i'm going to hit escape to get out of the cut and if i click this vector and hit n there's just a whole bunch of nodes in there i don't want to fiddle with that so what we're going to do instead is go over to the curve under create vectors and we're using the arc command i'm going to click that and with my snap turned on i'm going to let it pick the corner point i'm going to let it pick the lower corner point as well let's just make sure you see a little button that pops in the corner that way we know it clicked in and then we're just going to create an arc that just misses this line so we've got that we're going to close it we're going to come back and snip that out so now we have a nice clean line there so let's take a look at the rest of these just to make sure there might be a little goofiness there but that's not going to be seen so well we've got a couple spots right here um i'm not going to worry about that one either maybe i will we will put an arc in there as well so i'm just going to select that corner and select this upper corner and we're just going to create a gentle arc inward close that we're going to cut out the other piece so i clean that up a little bit and move on down and around there's another one that looks a little funny in this case i'm not going to create an arc this is obviously going to be several arcs so instead i am going to go take care of some nodes so we're going to select that and hit node and this is the problem right there all we have to do is drag that node in a little bit so we're going to click it and drag it in and then hit escape and now that looks a lot better we come down this little corner that that's not going to be noticed in fact this little area right here is noticeable but we're going to be cleaning out these slots with a quarter inch end mill and it is not going to cut into there it's just going to make a radius around there so i'm not even worried about that and oh we got to cut that little piece out right there i forgot to do that that's why it was messed up okay so we got that and we got this one here okay that's better and we got that one right there and we have that one right there all right now i don't think the the router bit is going to fit in this little pocket here but we'll just leave it there obviously it's not going to fit in that one i'm just going to delete that one we'll see how it looks when things are done okay the rest of our aesthetics are looking pretty good i think we're ready to go so it is time to start setting up our tool paths okay so we are about 50 minutes into this this was the whole design time again i know you've been here for a long time i've got to hand it to you that you've made it through this far in fact you might want to say down the comments garrett i hung around and like makes me go yes somebody really wants to know all this stuff and it's really learning from the stuff but that's what goes into doing all the design work but now it's getting to the point where the rubber meets the road we're going to get into the tool paths now and organizing our tool paths and working on them when there's problems in tool paths so this is the next step to making all this work into a beautiful finished project let's dive back in so we're going to go over to the tool path area and we're going to pick out an order of operations and our first order of operations are the stripes and if you're going to do this with red and white then you want to think about this from this vantage point before you even start cutting that you are going to be cutting things with color so you probably want to get the aura mask over your board you're going to like paint your primary colors first then the primary colors would be your blue for your uh for the the union and maybe i don't know maybe you want the whole thing black all the little lines black and the union black but you want the board to be with this base first color to be painted on the board but you'll also have to keep into account that that eagle is going to be painted too so you have to kind of look at it see how you want it painted mask off all the stuff that you don't want painted maybe you just want to stain the whole thing do that too and then put your aura mask on if you're going to paint stripes there's a link down below for the stuff that i use i think it's called 813 and it's it's sticky it works but i'm not going to do it in this video because i'm just showing you how to make this i'm not going to actually make it on the router okay so we are in tool paths and we want to come up with our order of operations so the first thing we're going to do are the stripes now we have white stripes and red stripes and on a flag the top stripe is red and the bottom stripes is red so we are going to actually create another layer and first of all we're going to come into layers and we're going to change stripes we're going to call that red stripes and now we're going to create a new layer called white stripes now i wish i'd done this before because it would have kept the stripes layers together and we're going to select okay so right now nope it didn't take it i have to type it in again white stripes the reason didn't take it you just need to click off of it all right so we're on the white stripes layer you know that because it's selected there and what we're going to do is just select each white stripe i'm holding the shift button down and i should again i should have done this before but this is part of the just piecing things together as you're moving along and realizing these are the things you do and they're habits that you pick up as you go okay so the white stripes are selected i'm just going to right click and come down to the bottom to move to layer and i'm going to select white stripes now we're all set because the red stripes are already on the red stripes layer if i turn the white stripes layer off the red stripes are still on the red stripes layer and i know that because red stripes layer is the only other one picked no i'm just going to take out the eagle there we go so let's just do the red stripes first and we're going to do these in a pocket mode so we're going to select pocket right here click that and we're going to do this with a quarter inch end mill and we'll just go point one deep that's actually pretty deep i think and we'll just go with point one and we're gonna be in offset mode so what it's gonna do it's gonna start in the middle and it's gonna go back and forth working its way out and that's about it now i would suggest that every time you do this if you are doing a down bit that you go into the edit the passes and add a second pass unless you've got a very rigid machine so the second pass is this feature right here and the reason being is because you can get steps in the bottom of your stripes and you don't want that and a lot of people what this is going to do is going to create another pass which means it's going to take twice as long to run your stripes but you got to do the way out do you want to sand or do you want to let the machine do the work so you don't have to sand and second finish passes are very common in the machining industry i've been in cnc for a very long time so we're going to make it thin we're just going to go .0 [Music] now 0.008 and we're going to click apply now 008 it's 8 thousandths of an inch very very shallow so i'll click ok and then i'm going to come down and calc well i'm going to name it red stripes and i'm going to calculate and i said no vector selected so i have to select all these and then calculate now it says ignoring unsuitable open vector so i have open vectors somewhere and i'm not sure where i'm going to say okay and see what it creates so it missed a stripe here so the way you go back the way you fix this is we're just going to close that we'll come back to this we're going to go back to a design area and turn on our 2d and see what's going on with this so i'm going to select the all three of these something wrong here what is it so we up here we have this tool path feature turned on you see all these little arrows when you generate your tool path if you want to get that out you click the button called toggle tool path and that turns that off so toolpath did run in there okay so here's part of the problem right there is i didn't clear that away so this will solve the problem i believe so just have to cut that out of there like that and it looks like everything else is okay that should solve it if we close that go back to our tool path we're going to go back into the red stripes and we're going to want to turn everything on i'm going to turn white stripes off somehow turn on the white stripes i want to go to red stripes not sure what happened there and i want to turn white stripes off there we go oh okay that's why it i must have been on the white stripes layer i have to cancel this no i don't what we're going to do is we're going to turn on the white stripes and we're going to select these two that need to be red stripes right click move to layer red stripes and we're going to come back up and turn the white stripes off and we are back to normal so we are in this tool path for the red stripe so i'm going to select everything and we are going to calculate i'm going to run this tool path or preview the tool path now we can't see it so what we're going to do is we're going to color it appropriately so this is set up on a walnut type of board it's oak and i'm just going to go with pine for right now right here is a feature called tool path color and what that's going to do is color everything that the tool or the router bit cleared away but it's only it's going to set it for whatever is highlighted blue down here so this item is highlighted blue it's called red stripes so we're going to open that up and select red and there are our red stripes so we're good to go there so now we're going to turn the red stripes layer off we're going to go down and turn the white stripes layer on and then we're going to select the white stripes and it's highlighted up here next thing we're going to do is split our screen left and right so now our white stripes are highlighted so we're going to go back in the pocket we're going to select that we have the quarter inch end mill we're making one pass there so we're going to edit our passes and do the same thing unfortunately well you know what i'm going to show you a little different technique i'm going to close this and what i'm going to do is come over the red stripes right click and click duplicate and so now it it duplicated exactly what's on here but we're just going to change that so we're going to double click it and we are going to select the white stripes which are highlighted right now and under the tool path that is already set up so we are good to go so i'm just going to cancel that because it's already there and we're going to change the name to white stripes and select that or calculate and then change the color right up here from red to white and click run or preview the tool path so there we go we've got that now we are going to do our stars so we're going to go back up to layers we're going to turn the stars layer on and we are going to click the stars layer so it shows up up here and then we're gonna turn our uh stripes white stripes off and we're gonna come over our tool path we're gonna close that and now we're going to select the v-carve pick that and now we are going to use a v-bit so up here you this flat depth should be unchecked for what you're going to be doing here now i'm going to run through the flat depth in a little bit you're going to learn something else here there's so much you're learning um yeah if you're liking this give me a thumbs up and a comment of what you might think and if you're new to this stuff sign up to subscribe to the channel you can sign up to my email list because i do webinars to teach beginner cncs and those that are wanting to make money if you want to make money with your machine sign up to cnc entrepreneurs facebook group lots of things to do i want you to succeed at this and get very creative let your creative juices flow okay so we are in here that's unchecked the start depth should be zero in fact the start depth should be zero for everything you're doing and we're going to select a v bit and we're going to go with the 90 v bit which is selected here but if it wasn't or the wrong bit was selected we would hit the select button and come over here and find our 90 degree v bit so i'm going to use the 90 degree quarter inch v bit that's the one that i use all the time that's the part of the bit set that i sell i sell a whole set of bits for beginners i sell surfacing bits and i'm expanding all the time i'm getting ready to get calipers and yeah lots of stuff so you can check out my website idc woodcraft there's links down below as well okay so i've selected that i hit ok and that bit is selected and we're not gonna mess well we got raster selected we're gonna select offset we're doing a v-carve we don't want to do this with raster right now we want it to work its way from [Music] inside out so just to show you the rasp the offset if you can see it kind of spirals outward from the middle whereas a raster it it has a little bit of tracing around the outside but it goes back and forth on the inside we don't want it to do that we want it to be in an offset mode i've got lots of videos about this kind of stuff so i'm not going to really explain this here and we're going to call this down at the bottom stars and we're going to calculate now it didn't work because um something went on here let's open this back up oh so i had a clearing tool here in this case you want that removed as well if there's a bit in there all you have to do is just click that check box and we call it stars i have to select the stars so we got the stars selected and we calculate now it said there's 40 duplicate vectors identified and that's because when we did this offset it actually overlaid stars on top of other stars so a vector if i put this vector up for sale i will have all that eliminated to have a very clean vector but what vectric will do will ignore them as it says here it says ignoring duplicate vectors so anything that's laid over top it's just going to not do anything with and so we're going to just let it rock and roll so we click ok and our stars are run and we're going to change the color the stars are highlighted down below and the stars are white on the flag so we're going to click that and then we're going to preview the selected tool path and there are our stars so we are really close with this thing now you know i know this is a long video um but i hope you're getting something out of this because there's so many lessons in here now there's something i'm seeing that i don't like but we'll take care of it a little while you see this with the eagle right there that a little bit of red that's probably not going to blend in well when the eagles put in and speaking of eagle that is what we're gonna be working on now and you're gonna learn another lesson in this video we're gonna be doing v-carving but one of the things you're gonna run into when you're doing v-carving is sometimes they just run way too deep into the project and it takes away from it so you're gonna learn a whole new thing about tool paths and doing v-carving that you didn't even know before all right so let's start working on the eagle and pick up this little tidbit that's going to help you out a ton let's go so let's start working on the eagle so i'm going to close that we're going to come split our screen right here side to side and we are going to turn on the eagle right here and then we're going to turn the stars off because we don't want them we're done with them the reason you turn layers on and off so they're out of the way don't accidentally pick things like that that's why layers come in so handy and that's why you want to look at your job up front this is like order of operations when you're putting something together it makes life so much easier so what we're going to do is select the entire eagle and i'm going to use the v carving tool here and again we're set at zero zero the flat depth is not checked but i'm gonna show you what that's about here in a little bit and we're gonna pick our router bit which will be a 90 degree v bit so that is already selected so and we are we can't select offset or raster here it defaults to 1. so we're going to come down and we're just going to call this eagle and we're going to click calculate and that's the tool path generation all that blue is all the paths that the bit is going to be taking and then we are going to run that tool path and so there is our eagle so there's some issues going on with the eagle that i want you to try to learn now the reason i'm teaching you this i had a call with someone who was actually working with an eagle and a flag in a very different format and i noticed that one of the things that he in his project his v-carving was very deep and eagle because he's doing a large flag and so it's the same thing here this will look way too deep in this area this area this area here here and up by the eye so we want to shallow that up a little bit so i'm not going to color up the eagle i'm going to come back to that in just a minute what i want to do is just cut out the flag so we're going to close this and we're going to come up to the profile tool we're going to select that now we have to come over to layers and we need to find our full body which is this guy right there i'm going to select it we're going to be on the you know what i selected a wrong thing i don't want a pocket tool path i want the profile tool path we're going to we're set at zero we want to go the full depth of the material so it's 0.75 if you don't know what it is you hit z equals and that will plug in the depth of your material we're going to use a quarter inch bit and this is going to be a down cutting bit it's going to set up its passes and we're going to be set up to the outside i'm set to a climb cut now climb cut will leave a smoother finish than a conventional cut will so when you're doing your finish cuts go to a climb cut i still owe you a video to explain the difference because there is a world of difference and we're just going to come down and i'm going to select or call it uh boundary and we're going to calculate and the tool path is shown up and there is our flag and the first thing i notice are the walls of the flag are too thin we want them to be a little bit bigger so we're going to do is just take this rectangle over here and we're just going to zoom into it and i'm going to hold the shift button down and grab the enter button and drag it out a little bit the shift button will keep it expanding from its center position and then we're going to go back into that boundary tool path and just recalculate it we there we go and i'm going to reset the view we're going to run all the tool paths and there it is and so our boundary looks a lot better it might be able to come out just a little bit more so you just follow the same steps so now we're going to work on this eagle and finalize this out so how do we get some of this depth out of here if we need to get that little red spot out that's easy we'll come back to that in just a minute so we're going to go back into the eagle right here by double clicking the bit and we're going to use this flat depth tool so right now this probably goes more than a halfway through the material so i want to limit how far down that's going to go so we're going to select the flat depth and we're going to just set a depth of 0.15 and what that'll do is that will create a downward limit of the v bit when it goes down however if we don't do some other things then we're gonna have a mess down in here so i want to show you what this would look like if i don't do a couple of the steps which i'll get to in just a minute we're going to calculate that and i'm going to reset this view and i'm going to run all the tool paths and you can see at the bottom of the eagle these don't go nearly as deep let me get this oriented right let's click that out of there but it's messy on the bottom that's because the v bit is trying to cut all that material away now you can see it stopped it didn't go any further than 1.5 or 0.15 inches so i like that but we need to clean that up so we're going to go back into the eagle by double clicking it and we are going to come down here to use clearance tools the clearance tool is going to come in and it's going to do some work first to clean this up and then the v bit will come in and finish it up so the clearance tool would be an end mill or something we have to select the bit so we're going to hit select and let's start with a 1 8 inch diameter end mill and we're going to select that and select and we're going to calculate this and then we are going to rerun the tool path and now you see it's cleaned things up quite a bit but we still have some funny noise in here so we're going to go back into the eagle now you see it has created eagle clear and then it has eagle that means there's two separate tool paths because there's two separate tools tools being router bits so we're going to select another one we're going to have to have a third bit in here maybe not i'm going to select the 16th and remove the 8th so i the 16th and the 8th are now in this field but i'm going to select the 8th and i'm going to remove it so now we only have the 16th that will actually increase the run time and let's see what this looks like so i'm going to reset the entire thing and let the whole thing run out and look at that it looks much worse so we're going to go back in we're going to select and we're going to add the 8th back into it so we click that and we want the 8 to be first not second we can dictate which router bit goes first the 16th or the eighth and this arrow right here will move it so now the eighth is on the bottom that means the 16th will run first we don't want that we want the bigger router bit to run first so the eighth is on top and i don't like that we have to do a third bit on this i imagine there's a way to get around that there we go look at that so it looks pretty darn good at this point there's a couple of rough spots right here no that's not a rough spot that's just the bottom of the v grip v bit this is why i love vectric so much it is so powerful and gives you so many tools to do so many different things what you just learned is a technique that will help you avoid buying more router bits like a 120 degree bit or 150 degree bit when you're doing large carves like this and yeah you just went over the top and learning something brand new let's just keep going so we're just going to do the final doctoring up the first thing we're going to do is get rid of this red spot right there and then i'm going to decide on this other red spot do i want to get rid of that or not and i think i'm going to keep that in here so what we're going to do is come back over to our drawing and we're going to split our screens and i'm going to turn everything on i'm going to turn all the layers on except for the bitmap and the feature we want to get rid of is right here pretty much center of the eagle and that's going to be this right here so i'm going to delete that and you can see there's a little piece right there it did not cut that i'm just going to delete that too we don't need it and i'm going to open up my tool path there's a little tab right here so just click that so i'm still in drawing mode and i'm just going to come down here to the calculator and hit recalculate it's going to recalculate that and then i'm going to open that up again and i'm going to click this here which is the preview tool paths button and i'm going to reset the entire thing and i'm going to run all the tool paths let it run out and then i'm going to expand this screen and i'm going to double click the outside boundary and it looks pretty good i like everything so we're going to do one final touch and this will be done now remember if you want this vector it's going to be available to you on etsy is there anything else that just looks goofy i mean this little red area might look a little goofy it looks a little funny right here that's because of the quarter inch end mill but i'm okay with that i tell you what i am going to expand this just a little bit bigger for the vector file so that's not quite there and you'll see just like a little hump right there it'll look much more natural okay so we're gonna color this in i want that eagle to be black so we're gonna come back into the eagle clear and up here we're gonna change the color to black so we have some black in there we're gonna go to the next one eagle clear two and change it to black we're good to go there and then we're gonna go to the final one which is eagle and we're gonna change that to black there you go now i'm gonna show you something kind of cool i'm gonna go back to eagle clear i'm going to change that color to orange and look at this kind of gives it a whole new look doesn't it so i kind of like that but i'm not going to paint it like that i don't quite have that patience okay obviously we are very close to the end there's three more things we're going to do we are going to just put the blue in the union just to make it look good and then we are going to add tabs i forgot to do that and then we're going to generate our tool path so let's just get back into it get this finished up if you're here still i got to hand it to you you know this took a lot of patience on your part but you've learned so much all right let's go ahead and wrap this thing up okay let's take care of the union first we're going to close this and we are going to split our screens and you want to just turn your union on so you can see it and it's on here so i'm just going to highlight it select it and we're going to go back into pocket mode and i'm just going to cut this shallow so i can put blue on it this is not a necessary part of this job and so i'm gonna make it a point zero two deep and we're just gonna go in an offset now i'm gonna [Music] i'm gonna put the name as union and this is something i forgot to do that you want to do with all your tool paths you want to just put in the end what your bit size is so i'm putting a 1 and a slash quarter em so i know that's a quarter inch end mill and i'll calculate and then change the color right up here to blue and then we'll run that and well it's already turned blue so that's good and we are good so you want to go back in we're going to close that and just change your names to the right bit that it's going to be using so for the red stripes it's going to be the quarter inch end mill now the red stripes clear is a different bit so you want to check that out so we're double clicking it and a different bit is the 1 8 end mill so we're just going to go back in there we're going to close that and we're going to go back into clear on the red stripes rename it with at the end to say 1-8 em and you'll want to do that all the way down as you create the layers okay and the next thing we want to do is uh add tabs to our project so that it holds on to this material until the job is completely done so to do that we have to go back into boundary select it and we're going to come down here add tabs i'm going to click that and i'm going to make my tabs a little beefy so they're going to be a 0.125 in length and then the thickness will be 0.15 i'm gonna select edit tabs and i want to have six tabs so we just change our number accordingly until it says six and then we hit the button add tabs now you're gonna look over here and you're gonna see that it put tabs two on the side and two on the top two on the bottom we don't want the ones on the side so you can either just click it and drag it around or you just click it and let go and then click somewhere on the line and then we come back over we add tabs select that and just calculate from there and we rerun our project we're going to run everything over after reset i hit the reset when it was right in the middle of it so got to do it again and there's everything and now we have tabs in our project let me just expand that and there are our tabs right there all right so it's time for tool paths so we're going to close this and now we're going to go into the save mode so we hit that and when you have so many different tool paths you want the vectric to just bring them all together as much as possible the thing you want to remember is you want to go from your biggest end mill to your smallest so it'd be quarter inch and then our eighth inch and if we use the 16th that would be the third and then you go into your v carving tools so in order to just run all the tool paths at once because i am very comfortable with what i've done i am going to select the third one and it says visible tool paths to multiple files and then it's checked group where possible so whenever it can it'll merge two of these items in the tool path area together or more you want to select the tool path so everything is highlighted and then you click save tool paths now just so you know i use a uni uh a usb drive a flash drive so load all my g-code onto that and then import the programs that i want to run accordingly and then i load the next one in but if you have a post-processor which will allow you to run directly to your machine this feature right here this checkbox will be not grayed out you'll be able to select it so with all the tool paths down here selected i'm going to click save toolpaths and it now imported those tool paths into my directory i'm going to go up i there we're going to go up there and because i think i did it before as i rehearse this now you see there's a name in here already and it has one eighth end mills it's the name is red stripes clear so what i'm going to do is take out the 1 8 end mill and i'm going to take out the clear i'm going to take out everything i'm going to title it eagle and you'll understand why in just a moment and i'm going to click save now if we go to that directory just let me get through this where is it it should be right there and there are all our files so now they're all named eagle that was the name i changed it to and then it tells you all the different files so this is the 1 8 end mill it says it right there there's a quarter inch end mill because it didn't change the name on these other things the router bit does not show up and that's why you want that to be there then you'll know that you can just methodically work through the quarter inch end mills and then work your way to the eighth inch end mills and then work your way to the v bits and that is it so we are done if this helped you out give me a thumbs up and go have a break i certainly am going to go have a beer and i hope you have yourself a great day

Channel: CNC Routers, Beginners & Beyond - Garrett Fromme

Views: 25,244

Keywords: vcarve tutorial, cnc router, vectric tutorial, how to design an american flag, aspire tutorial, vectric vcarve tutorial, how to use vcarve, vcarve pro, vectric aspire, american flag, cnc, wooden flag, cnc for beginners, how to make american flag, vcarve tips and tricks, cnc tips and tricks, vectric tutorials youtube, vcarve, vectric, aspire, cnc projects, designing cnc projects, how to design cnc projects, garrett fromme, how to use vectric, cncprojects for beginners

Id: 7069FGnt7WQ

Length: 84min 20sec (5060 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021