How To Design From Difficult Bitmaps for CNC Router Projects [Vcarve & Aspire] - Garrett Fromme

hi i'm garrett with idc woodcraft and i'd like to welcome you to this video have you ever come across a project that you wanted to do and the more you looked at it the more impossible it seemed well i was doing a one-on-one with a guy named ted and he was trying to work through a logo that somebody gave him to make and the more i looked at it the harder it looked like it was going to be and that actually proved to be the case the more i looked at this the the more i was like i don't know how to do this but i still got it and finally came up with a way so what i'm going to do in this video is actually go through this thought process what i want you to try to grasp here is just the thinking process that somebody goes through as they're creating a project especially something like this as you'll see in a minute that it's got a lot of challenges to it that's going to take a lot of thinking to work through so that's what makes this video a bit lengthy what i want to start doing is whatever i do and design work i want to put on the router and show you how that works with the router should take you all the way through but in this case i'm not going to do that this is not my project so i have no desire to make it myself the issue is the design issue so we're going to dive into vectric and just start walking through this and you're going to learn a few tips and tricks along the way of how to resolve issues this is actually kind of an important video because it it really makes you think about how to get through a tough project the good thing is is by the time you're done you've taken yourself up a notch so i hope that this video you learned something from it if you stick around through the whole thing give me a thumbs up and give me a comment say i stuck around because this was hard and i think that's about it let's just dive into the project let's go okay so this is the logo that we're going to be working on and trying to solve how do we do something like this where when you're looking at it the more you look at it the more possible it seems and so we are going to be working through this the first thing i want to do is show you what ted wanted to do and then we're going to talk about why it is uh not going to work well that way and how we're going to rethink this so i modeled it up in the way that he wanted it so his thought was to take the mousy t's the big m and the circle there we go and raise them up and then have the switch down below and a lower level and so when we look at this or when i was looking at it with him it was becoming very clear very quickly that it it was not an easy project to do by the way he wanted to do it in fact i wasn't even sure how to do it because there's several things going on here that make it a challenge number one is this little area right here you have these black parts of this big circle that we want to retain that character in the circle and if we raise that circle up being as thin as it is this being a 12 inch by 12 inch project those will break off in fact we'll probably have breakage all the way around because the circle will be so thin so that's the first problem that i saw the next problem uh let's go back here was all this noise on the swish okay very jagged going back and forth and wondering how i was gonna actually cut that with a bit all i saw was uh having to go to a smaller and smaller and smaller bit like a 164th in order to get into some of these small areas and still won't be able to get into it the third one was the circle is kind of the same way it's a bit jagged but it is crossing through the swish which threw up a little bit of a how do i approach this in a practical way and the fourth one was the m the swish is going through the m and it's going through the circle here but there's another issue that i saw when he wanted to do that is if he's wanting to cut this outsole that's raised that means that he has to surface everything here around all these elements and by doing that it's going to make it very impractical there's going to be a lot of run time on the machine and there will be several bit changes you'd use a quarter inch to rough it out and then you'd go down to an eighth inch to get down in the areas like in here under the letters and and then he'll have to use a 16th inch to get into the corners of it we are on a small project it's only 12 inches by 12 inches and so basically with all that run time it's just it's impractical as it would be like probably three hours worth of cut time something you don't want to do and you don't need to so we are going to approach this so differently very very differently we will have an area raised up we will have the m raised up but the rest of it will be done differently instead of raising up the circle and mousey t's we are going to v-carve them and then the swish that runs through everything will have an outline cut and it'll be painted on the inside so in order for ted to be able to do what i have in my mind he has to paint the whole board white and get it completely finished first and then put aura mask on it now or a mask is a material that that you put on top of a project and you can cut into it it'll cut cleanly and then after you cut the project you can spray paint your carving area and it'll protect the areas that have the aura mask on it or a mask it's pretty much made for this kind of stuff so there are other products out there but auramask is the one to use there is a link down in the description for that so you can get some if you want to use it i'm not going to demonstrate or mask here this whole video is going to take a little longer than i wanted to take anyway the whole intent of this video is to help you think through complicated projects like this and to give you some guidance as to how to think about it okay so with that being said i'm just going to reiterate we're going to carve out the m we're going to make a pocket for the m and then we're going to make a separate m and we're going to insert it into the m that we carved out on so the m will be raised up we're going to v carve mousey tees and the circle and then the swish is going to be trimmed around and we'll peel the aura mask from the swish and then we'll paint it huh multiple steps in this project with ted it's going to be a good learning project for you okay so first of all the project is 12 inches by 12 inches and we need to get the image scaled up to that so we have to select the image so we have the dotted line going around it that means it's selected and we're going to go to the transform objects area which is right there and the second icon from the left when you hover over it says set selected object size pick that button and what we're going to do is we're going to be changing the size of this project to the size of the the size of the logo to the size of the project now looking at the logo it looks like it's wider than it is taller so we're going to focus on the width we want the width to be 12 inches and we'll just let the height scale with it the way we do that is when we're inside the set size we're going to leave the two radio buttons set as they are we're going to come down to the anchor and we want the anchor to be selected in the middle that means it's going to expand out from the middle as when we scale it we want the width to be proper loop width so we just can change that number to 12 and make sure the xy link is selected and then click apply and now we've changed the size of the project to the size of the logo or vice versa all right so while we're looking at this this noisy messy actually really cool logo has to be broken down into its constituent components so what i mean by that are there are four components in this logo there's the big m there's the swish that goes through it there's the text mousey teas and then there's the circle so what we want to do is create layers for each one so we can work with each one independently so when it comes to really challenging projects like this that you have to really start working with layers to keep your mind straight if you're not then you're you get really confused really quick so what we're going to do is we're going to start building up the layers now for this we're going to break it into its four constituent components so let's go and i'll show you how to set that up so we have the four elements so what we're gonna do is come up to layers click it we already have the two layers we have the layer that we came in with layer one and then we have the bitmap layer which is where the logo is at we want three more layers to get those four components so i'm just going to click add new layer three times there we go but i also want a base layer to work off of so i'm going to create another layer as well and you'll understand this in a minute so what i'm going to do is go back to layer 1 click it twice and i'm going to change that name to base logo then we'll go to layer 2 and we're going to change that to big m layer 3 we will call this circle layer 4 we will call it mousy for the for the text and then layer five will be the swish so we'll call it swish but we want another layer uh no we don't i already created i'm sorry we probably will want another layer the way i'm looking at this we probably do need a second layer but let's just go forward and we'll see how to use that if we need to apply it okay so this is where things get a little screwy when we start tracing bitmaps that's what we're going to be doing next we're actually going to have to trace the bitmap twice and you'll understand this as we go along because we got this swish going through the circle and the m and other things so you really want to pay attention to this section here as to what we're doing okay so we're going to click the big m image so it highlights and we're going to trace this bitmap that's the first thing we're going to do so we're going to come over to create vectors and under create vectors is where you draw all your lines and letters and everything we're going to come down to the bottom the very last one to the left and it says trace bitmap select that and you might need to make sure that the bitmap is selected and you know it's selected when you have the purple line around it all right so we're going to look at this and you notice right away that the swish is gone so we're going to need this swish in here at some point don't want to put the swish in or do it so this is where we run into the problem when i turn it up and get the swish in there we lose the circle right there and we lose the m in mousey but that won't be an issue so what i'm going to do is start off with the the way i got that is i slid the slider right over here and i was just adjusting like the density of the picture until everything popped in and i went too far there so i'm going to go there and with that i'm just going to take everything in do i want to work with it like that i don't want to start off with a circle so we don't see the circle right now so i want to work with the circle first so what we're going to do is we're going to tone that down until the swisher's not touching the circle okay so the swish there's a little bit of the swish there and the reason i only toned it down to that point so i can retain as much of the character of the circle as possible you'll watch if i tone it down more let's just come up we start to lose the circle so i want the circles about as dense as i can get it so i'm just scrolling back until we get there okay so we're not touching right there at this point what we're going to do is come down here and we are going to leave our corner fit up at the higher end about 75 what that's going to do is uh smooth it'll make our nodes give us less nodes i'm not sure i want to do that corner i'm going to put about 50 it'll be less nodes and it'll be more straight lines but straight lines can be an issue and something like this we'll look in a minute there's so much going on in my head when we're thinking through a project like this so with that i'm going to leave the noise filter low and i'm going to preview click the preview button at the bottom and you see now we just created some lines around everything and i just want to make sure it's not created a connection right there which it didn't so i'm good to go and we're going to click apply and close so right now we come up to the layers and i just made a mistake i just put everything on the swish layer and i don't want that so i didn't switch my layer properly i'm going to turn off the other layers i'm not even using i'm going to turn off the bitmap layer and i want to get all this stuff onto the base layer so we're going to just select everything and first is we're going to move it to the proper layer we're going to get it off the swish layer and get it to the the base layer so now we're going to switch over to base layer by clicking the word and we're going to turn off the swish by clicking the little light bulb okay now we're going to get rid of the stuff we don't want like this this extra thing right there we're going to just hover over it and delete it same here get that noise out there and we got a little noise right there we want to get rid of all the swish i don't want to swish right now all right so that's gone and we've got a little spot right there it doesn't need to be in there okay and let's just take another gander all the way around make sure it didn't insert some tiny stuff in there that i don't want to work with that's going to cause some alarms and i don't see it okay so we have our circle so the first thing we're going to do is just get the circle out of there we're going to move it to its proper layer so i'm going to select everything on the circle i selected that i'm going to hold the shift down and select everything else that's to the circle we're right click come down to move to layer and remove that to layer circle we're going to take the m and we're going to move it to layer um big m okay then mouzy t's looks like we got a little blurb right there we don't want and we'll take mouzy tease and we're going to move that to mousy layer move and mousey right there okay so there is something that i need to do that i didn't do well no we have to go back and do this now okay so i'm turning on those three layers the big m the circle and and what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab them all and i'm going to copy them back to the base layer so we're going to right click and we're going to come down to copy and we're going to copy it to the base logo and the reason i did that is because i want to have the foundation i'm working from and by removing them and i start manipulating them i may actually accidentally make a mistake and i don't want to do that so now if i turn those layers off it's still there and it's on the base logo layer now which is what i want okay so now we need to get the swish in here now that's going to pose a problem because the swish is going to interfere with the circle and when it creates new vectors if i go into turn a bitmap on here we go we're just going to turn a bitmap on and we already have our base logo vectors and if i try to retrace the bitmap again it's going to retrace but it's not going to be exact to what we had before however i want the switch in there so what we're going to do instead is we're going to create another layer called temp and it's going to be like a project layer where we can import the swish and then work with it with the circle you'll understand this in a minute this is a challenging challenging project okay i created a layer temp and it says temp up here now i want to turn off the base logo so we're going to turn that off i want it out of the way and we're going to select the image and we'll go back to trace bitmap again okay so i want you to pay attention to what we're going to be doing here i have to actually trace the bitmap again because we have to get the swish into this thing but i've got a problem i can't trace the bitmap over an old trace so i have to create the new layer and then do that but watch what i do here you're going to find this really interesting is that how i managed to create this swish so it's going to take a little bit of thinking but you'll get it and at the end we will have a swish so check this out and now i'm going to take that slider and i'm going to bring it up so the whole swish comes in and that was too far there we go and i'm going to run with that so we're just going to go straight down and we're going to preview apply and close and now i'm going to go in and turn off the bitmap make sure that i am on temp layer and we don't need the mousy in there we don't need the m in there this the whole point of doing this temporary layer is to get the circle to work right here's why i am i don't even know how to word it if i turn the bitmap layer on and turn the temp off we got the circle it runs through the swish so what i have to do is i if we're going to cut this swish out we have to create a stop point for it to cut it out well i just have to create the swish first of all so i may not have to create a stop yes i do maybe not i don't i'm not sure yet i'm still piecing this whole thing together we're going to turn the temp layer back on we're going to turn a bitmap off and i apologize this is just a hard thinking project i'm going to delete the m because i don't want to work on that i'm working with the swish and the circle and we don't need this either now there may be an issue right in here so i'm just going to delete everything else right there delete delete now we have the m in there and we've got all kinds of noise inside this swish we will take care of it in a little bit now you see the big m has outline here and that's just part of it but we got little spots there we don't want that that's just noise it's i want to get everything out of the way that we don't want in the way so we got a lot of stuff up here too and one thing when we turn on this bitmap layer you see there's all kinds of white spots in there you can paint those white spots on by hand we're not gonna we're not gonna fiddle with them we're going to eliminate it from here and we're going to paint the swish gray so we're just going to delete all these little spots get them all out of the way because right now they're interfering with what we're going to be doing next okay so i have to keep that little piece right there so i delete oh i did delete something i didn't want to delete those inside the m i don't have to think about that we got this little part of the m goes like that and let me show you on the bitmap we like that so we've got this part of the m where the switch goes through i think we're gonna be okay so what we're gonna do is we're going to eliminate these two little circles there and then that and any other noise that may be in here there's a couple there there's one there and there's a couple up here and right there so now here's where my problem starts to come in so the circle is attached to the swish and we have to break that attachment so what i'm going to do is turn the circle layer on for a moment i want to see how that runs through here because i'm going to v-carve the circle through here so i want to not necessarily have the swish as a part of that it doesn't matter nope okay here's what we're going to do the swish is all going to be one vector i'm going to turn the circle back off and what we're going to do is we're just going to take a line one line we can use a swirly line right here that curved line and we want to have our snaps turned on right up here and i'm just going to start on the line and i'm just going to click a few times until i get over to there and the line touches there so i'm assuming you understand snaps if not you'll have to find some videos that i have i'll try to put a video down below that talks about snaps i actually have made a video specifically about snapping so i'll have to do that okay so i'm going to do it down here too i'm just going to create this little the line is going to kind of flow with the swirl or the swish then i hit spacebar to terminate that and we're going to do the same thing over here so it looks like i'm going to turn the bitmap on so it's looking like the swish kind of i don't know if it kind of runs that way but i'm going to treat it as if it is this is one swish and this is another swish in fact we're going to modify it just to keep things separate because what i'm seeing is when i picture this in my mind as a carving it's going to get really close to each other here so i don't want it so close that i can't work with it so we're going to do a little bit of altering to the swish the the thing about altering a project is if the alterations are minor the person who's getting it isn't really going to see the minor alterations that we're making as long as the main character is still held in it so we got another one right here and click right there and it looks like i went a little far so i have to remember that vectric has a feature in it where i can back up one click and i don't remember what that is i know mike mizellick did a video on some of those features so i'll have to watch that video again so i'm going to click this one and we're just going to do the same thing here this version 11 has a lot of new features to it and we'll do the same thing over here okay so now we got that and what i'm going to do is i'm going to come in here and i'm going to cut use the scissors first of all we're going to yeah we'll just use the scissors we'll use the cut command little scissors and we'll cut in the away from the circles there there and then i have a little spot where it crossed over so i'm just going to cut it right there and i don't need the circle there and we don't need the circle over here and we don't need the circle on the other side this is all for the swish all right so i think we're in good shape and that means now we can get rid of all the other noise let's turn temp off we're gonna everything here is now swish we just want the swish so we're getting rid of anything that's non-swish circle okay we got one little area there that i didn't close up so i'm going to grab a poly uh the curve draw curve and i'm just going to come in and finish that out just like that and then we're going to cut the circle there and now we have our swish and that is going to be i'll hit the escape button to get out of that and now i'm going to grab that swish everything and i'm going to move it to layer swish so i hope you got that the way we created that swish we had to manipulate things and just create some stuff and adjust some things to make it work so we got a lot of work ahead of us because we still got a lot of refinement to do but i hope that you understand now why we had to create a swish the second time and how he worked through that problem of creating a swish that's going through other elements all right let's keep going okay so what i want to do is show you what we've now created we're going to go to swish turn it on mousy on circle on big m on so we have now created the base logo we still have the mousy that's an issue the mousey is the so we still have an issue going on here we're going to have what we want to do is i'm going to fix more of the swish what i want is the swish to just drive right through you'll understand this later on so it's going to come right through the m it's going to come right through over here and right through over here so we're going to now go back to the swish the temp layer now we have we're on the circle layer now so we have to turn that on i'm sorry the swish layer and we're going to change us to the swish layer so click swish and it says swish up here i'm going to turn the bitmap back on just so we can get eyeball what we're doing so we're going to draw a line just across here and get rid of this part of the m so i'm going to get the draw curve and we're going to go back in here snap to that just come in like that and right there and we've got it there we did a little crossover again so i definitely have to go find that uh little thing a little feature so i'm going to do the same with the swish over here we're just going to come across and go to there space and then over here we're going to do the same thing i'm going to start it up at the top and we're going to come in over over over over over and then touch the line there escape and now i'm going to cut in between everything in between that that and that and then we're also going to fix that little crossover there trim that and i'm going to delete this little feature right there we don't need that let me you'll need um there delete that okay now it looks like our swisher's complete but we're going to clean it up just a little bit make sure that some of our noise is out of there it might create some issues i'm just looking at all the sharp areas in there and we'll just kind of stay with it this might be an issue here what i'm going to do because we're going to kind of just cut a line around here a drag knife would be good we're going to select that and i'm going to hit n for node and then i'm just going to delete a couple of nodes i'm going to delete these four nodes so what it did is i created a window around them okay you can see i accidentally created a window around this flag right there i didn't want to do that so we're gonna just click off click back on and make sure i don't grab that flag and hit delete and control z i grabbed that you want to hit d not delete that's what i just did so d and it got rid of that now i'm going to hover over that one and hit d again and now we're set up so now our switch is taken care of now we've got some corners on the switch that's not going to matter all right so i hit escape to get out of node mode we've got another little bumpy thing right there i want to delete some of that so i'm gonna go back into node and we're just gonna hover over that one hit d i'm gonna hover over that one hit d and hover over we'll just drag that one down and we're gonna grab the little flag and flip it around just like that okay um this is gonna be not so good either so we're gonna do that one too we're gonna just grab a whole bunch of them and hit d and we'll let's see i'm going to hit d on that one and [Music] if you're still hanging around put down the comments i'm still hanging around because i gotta hand it to you well you've been around for a little while and now you get the gist of why this is so difficult and you've probably had to have a couple cups of coffee to keep you awake during this but i hope that you're learning something if you are give me a thumbs up and a comment some suggestions how you might handle this project let's keep going what we're doing is a difficult project and i i know that i'm going fast on this and i hate to have to go fast on it but i can tell you i've practiced it this quite quite a few times quite a few times and i still didn't quite get it right okay so now we're done with look at everything again and we've got all that built up now the circle runs through there that's good okay so what i don't like is the swish is so close to the end of that v carve the circle is a v carb so all these little weird lines here are going to be v carved i want that swish to be inside of it a little bit so i'm going to select the swish i'm going to press n and i'm going to just drag the nodes in a little bit i just i don't want them over there so close to it and we're going to fix that one just dragging the flags around and so that's moved away a bit i'm going to delete that one hit t and that's gone okay so we're looking good there and the only other thing we have to do is fix mousy so this is an issue so mousy if you look at it closely we still have a lot of work to do we have to fix this m too the m is not in good shape um so let's work on the m first then we'll fix mauzy and i'll show you why m is not in good shape if you zoom in you can see it's bumpy if we're going to carve out an m we want to carve out a nice clean m but we've got bumps in there so we've got to fix that so we're going to do is switch to the big m layer and then we're going to turn all the other layers off and now all we're doing is looking at the big m i'm going to select the big m and hit n for node and now you see why it's all bumpy there's just too much stuff in there what i want is a straight line right up here and i want to see if that turns into a corner that's not a corner node right there um so what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag this node right here up to there i'm just going to raise it up just a little bit we're altering the m then we're going to drag the other two nodes over just like that then hover over them and hit d and d and now we have another little issue so we're going to hover over that node and hit d and you can see there's another issue going on right here i'm just going to grab that flag and just pull it in line for right now okay so now we want straight lines so i am going to simply go from one black node i got a black node right there and that's a transition node there's a black node right there so we're going to say our curve starts right here what we're going to do is select everything all our nodes and we're going to go use this button right here under edit objects curve to fit and that's going to clean things up uh i wish i had shown you this earlier but it's a great little feature you select that and you notice that it's it's showing all those nodes and when i hit preview watch what happens with all these nodes i hit preview and all of a sudden a lot of our nodes loosen up but i'm going to change our tolerance to 0.005 and i think that's too much yep i want to change it to 0.02 and preview all right so now it's starting to clean things up quite a bit we're going to say okay and then i go back to node again i want to look at the m so we still have some screwy areas but take a look at the nodes now and hit n and you see we've eliminated so many nodes it's not funny so i am going to which node do i want to keep this all works it's just working through it i'm moving that up a little bit i'm going to smooth this node right here let's see what happens so i hover over the node and hit s and is it going to allow me to smooth it no it won't because that's an arc it's created everything is an arc now so we're just going to start deleting d how do i know it's an arc between two black nodes is a little like oops little green dot that tells me it's an arc so here's how we can fix it it's very easy to get a straight line we can get rid of some of those arcs first i'm just going to get rid of nodes i'm just selecting nodes and deleting deleting deleting and now you see there's an arc right there so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hover over that arc right at the middle and i hit d and it eliminated that line and i'm going to go in to draw a line and i'm just going to this is a straight line i'll go on the end there i'm going to just go right there and now we have created a straight line so i'm going to doctor this up by doing what i just showed you and you see by the way that now we have an open vector i'm just going to hit shift and select that one and then i'm going to come over to this button join with a line and i'm going to hit it twice and now that line is now part of the m and we're going to fix all the rest of this stuff up so i'm going to fix this up i'm going to pause the recording until i get that one fixed and we'll get to the net okay now i have fixed the m and i'll show it to you i've cleaned up the majority of the nodes hit the wrong button node there's still a couple that probably need some work but i'm going to leave it as it is it's got a little curve down here it's this node right there i don't really need that node right there so i'm going to delete that one and if we have a straight line there so i'll delete one more d and a couple more like right up here we don't want that little arc right there and i don't need that little arc right in there so we're at a corner right there i'm just going to drag this one down just a little bit to smooth that out and for the most part this is what we're going to fly with so the m is now done and let that go i'm going to let that go we'll take this one out delete and drag that little bead down a little bit so we still have that flow then we got a couple more right in here which we'll delete there oh we don't want to delete that one i'm going to control z i'm going to delete that one and we're going to leave it like that okay so the m is done everything else is going to stay okay so we're done with the m and we are going to leave it there now we have to work on the mousy the mousy text all right we've got the m done now we get to work on that mousy text we have to actually redraw the text with text and we're going to put it on a curve so we have to do a little bit of work with the text there as well so you're gonna learn something new here again so i just switched over to mousey layer and i'm activating it and turned off the big m and so now we have mauzy ts and we pretty much have the same problem here this text just doesn't look good you see it's kind of screwed up here it doesn't it's not even all the way around it just didn't do a clean cut so i had to ask somebody for some guidance on this because there were some issues but the guidance that he gave me was really really good so here's what we're going to do we're going to type in text and i'm thinking that this is times new roman so we're just going to type start the text feature and we'll just start it right up there it'll come down a little bit more and i'm going to type in ty mousey m-a-u-z-i-e-t-e-e-s [Music] and it's obviously too big so we're going to bring that down how big should we make this i'm going to close that and i'm going to get the measuring tape right here i have to switch my glasses for a minute okay so the measuring tape right there and click it and we're just going to measure the height of this m and so i clicked the bottom and clicked the top and so that is 0.877 inches tall so we're going to close the measure and we're going to select mousy and we're going to select the text and it's going to highlight mousy and i'm going to overwrite the text height right here to 0.877 and i'm going to close this and then i'm going to move it over so i'm just going to use the cursor keys to move it over a bit now i'm thinking that this is still not looking so good we'll see in a minute what we're going to do is draw an arc right under mouse et's i'm going to grab the arc command and click it and then i'm going to come over to this part of mousey and i'm going to click right there we're not quite at the end of the m but that's okay we're pretty close as far over to the s that i can where that line would hit and where the curve would come up to end where that would intersect would be right there and then we're going to come over and draw the arc underneath right there and then we'll close that so now i'm going to select mousy and then i'm going to select the arc so i'm going to hold shift and select the arc and we're going to go into text on a curve select that and it's going to give me a little warning it says the text is too long to fit so let's see what happens i'm going to click ok and it pushed the text in there so the text is just a little longer you can see that it it's not so bad there i think it looks okay it can be a little taller a little thinner but i'm going to work with this for right now so what we're going to do is i'm going to click off and then i'm going to get rid of the old text so i'm just going to grab a few items and just come across and delete there we go so we have mousey tees we're going to turn the bitmap on well first we got to get out of this feature over here close that and then i'm going to turn on the bitmap and see how that text overwrites and it's not so bad we can move it over a little bit we can select it i think we can move it over um no we're okay we're just going to leave it the way it's the way it is they are not going to quite notice but what i am going to do is separate some letters like the i is very close to the z so we're going to come over to this feature here we're under create vectors it's got this little next to the two t's is one that says edit text spacing select that and then we're going to come in between and we're going to hold down the shift button we're going to come in between the z and the i and we're going to click a couple of times to separate that i'm going to see if there's anything else that's too close there's the e can be a little close so i'm going to separate that i'm going to separate the s a little bit and then i can bring this together here so now i'm going to let go the shift button and click in there just to bring the the mouse e t's a little closer together so we're just doing a little doctoring up it's a little bit out of scale but i'm going to let this roll with this so now i'm going to delete that curve and now we have mao zt's if i get rid of the bitmap we got mouse et's all right i think we're done a lot of work to put this thing together and a lot of thought ahead of time to actually make this work to this point it's time to run tool paths so you know you got to watch this to see how i actually do all this kind of stuff because it's a little bit of a challenge as well but let's take a look at what we've got so far okay so now if we go to big m circle we have mao zt's taken care of and we go to swish there is our whole project now you notice that the swish is crossing right over the circle line that i'm not going to worry about that and you'll understand in just a minute why it's not an issue so we're going to go into our tool paths now we are set up and ready to go i just want to take a look at this real quick we're going to bring this out a little bit i'm going to take hit node and i'm going to drag this down make it a little bit bigger and i'm going to drag this one over i'm going to grab that and twist it around and bring it out drag that down i just want it to be a little bit bigger when it's coming out and i'm going to leave the other two now this one's a little small it may not even show up in our project because it's so shallow so we'll give it a little bit more size by moving that node and uh we'll go ahead and leave that alone okay so now what i want to do you see the black nodes in here i don't want black nodes so while it's highlighted i'm going to come over and curve to fit so let's get this into the window we're going to curve to fit that so we're going to use that little feature right here under edit objects select it and i am going to simply preview it and then say ok and take a look at it so what will happen is this will cut much cleaner now it's lost a lot of its jaggedness so i'm going to control z and see if we want to keep that jaggedness it's just going to cut weird you know what it's it's such a funny shape and it's got some character to it so we're going to leave it as it is i'm not going to actually do that curve thing so we'll leave it like that okay we're ready to generate some tool paths so we're going to come over select this blue button hit that and the first tool path is the big m we're going to cut that pocket out so that we can make another m and insert it into it so the first thing we'll do is select the pocket command and i'm going to do this with um we're going to go a quarter inch deep 0.25 right there the depth of cut and then the bits i'm not sure i think we'll do this with a quarter inch we'll just do it with an eighth inch i'm going to select the quarter inch and i'm going to remove it it's going to increase the machining time that's but it's going to make life a little bit simpler and then we're going to go with the raster cut it doesn't really matter we're going to use the offset offset will probably be a little more efficient and then we're just going to go with that and i am going to i don't know how many passes it's going to take two passes so it's going to be two passes to cut out that m to a quarter of an inch we're going to come down and we're going to name that big m and we're going to say 1 8 em and calculate and no vector selected i have to select the big m calculate and there it is so it's going to take a little bit let's see how long it'll take close that and look at the clock and that'll take about 19 minutes to cut that out so close that and i'm using the eighth inch end mill at a 40 step over we go into the tool path and run it and there's our big m there's our pocket we are done with the m now we're going to go split our screen and we're going to now do some v-carving so we don't need the big m anymore i'm going to click off here because i don't want the m selected and we're going to go up to layers right here and we are going to turn big m off and we're going to turn the swish off we only want mousing circle because we're going to v-carve both of these so now we go to the v-carve and we'll v-carve these with a 60 degree v-bit and the reason i'm going to use a 60 is because i want to make sure we dig into these holes a little bit it may be a little deep in a couple spots but i think we're going to be okay so make sure the flat bottom depth is not checked our start depth is at zero we select our bit and that bit is going to be a 60 degree v-bit quarter inch diameter the same one that is sold on the idc woodcraft store and i'm going to leave it at that we're going to say we're going to name it we're going to call it um mousy m-a-u-z-i-e circle and then we're going to type in at the end 60 v and then we're going to calculate it then again like i always do i didn't select the vectors so we're going to select everything and calculate and now i'm going to give it the color black because that's the color of it in the um in the project so you have to select the radio button tool color and black and now we're going to run that tool path and now we have mouse et's and we have got our little black spots right there okay now we're going to turn off the layers mao zt or mousy and swish and we are going to turn on layer swish everything else is going to be turned off there we go and swish no it's the only one that needs to be turned on and we're going to click over in the gray area right here just to deselect anything and now i'm going to select everything here and we are going to do a profile cut we are simply going to cut along the line now remember we have put we've put aura mask over the top of this okay so i forgot to tell you what aura mask was so aura mask is this material right here and it says horror mask on the back of it and auramask is this plastic sticker sheeting and it's actually pretty stiff you can cut it really well so you put it over your project piece like this and then you start to cut into the project piece and then you spray paint that cut and then you peel the aura mask away and then you get something like this little thing i did on engineering flooring so i had carved out gratitude i had the oar mask on it then i carved out gratitude then i spray painted it and let it dry and then i peeled off the aura mask and got this very cool gratitude which seems to be everybody's favorite so that's what aurora mask is and if you want some of this stuff it's very cool there's a link down below where you can get this stuff all right let's uh keep on going and before we move on we need to put a second layer of auramask over the over everything because we're going to spray paint gray inside of here so you can have multiple layers of aura mask on top of each other and it'll still work but we want to protect everything else so what we're going to do is before you do this you put your second layer of aura mask on uh okay so this is where you're going to keep our head straight first thing we have to do is spray paint mousey tees with our first layer of oil mask and let it dry so you can do that right on the machine and the you but you need to protect the m in fact we should probably cut the mouse et's in the circle first to spray paint it and then come back and cut the m so basically i drew it like this we're just going to have mousy circle highlighted and we're going to come over and select that little arrow right there and move it up so it is the first cut now and the m will be cut second i hope that makes sense to you if i go back and re-reset the tool paths and i run the first tool path it's going to be a 60 degree v-bit with mouse et and i run that tool path now we have that so now we spray paint all that let it dry you have aura mask over everything and then you change your bit to the 1 8 bit and run that after it's dry and now you have that and now you put your aura mask over all this stuff that's you've just cut so you have two layers of oreo mask and now we're going to do a profile right there and we're going to take a third bit and we're just going to profile a line we're just going to take the 30 degree v bit or 20 degree b bit and we are simply going to cut like the edge of this material all the way around so our depth of cut is going to be very shallow we'll make it a point one point zero one maybe point zero one five so that fine bit will just cut just into the wood just enough to cut the aura mask and we're gonna use the 30 degree v-bit also available on the idc woodcraft store and we want to make sure that we are on the line and then we're going to select everything and come over give it a name and we're going to call this swish 30v and calculate and then we're going to run it um okay so i see a little bit of a problem we're going to run the tool path so i'm going to make that tool path a little bit deeper because it didn't show up very well here so we're just going to cut it deeper so we can see it but you only want it to be like a point 1 uh 0.015 so we'll make it at a point 3 and we run it but i do see a little bit of a problem here that um oops i didn't put in a zero we're gonna put a point zero three point zero three and rerun that and then i have to recalculate everything um reset and rerun we're going to run all the tool paths okay so now we've made a cut in the aura mask the problem is is we cut across the m there and when you peel away the aura mask it's going to peel off the m in this area right there and right there what you'll have to do is come back in and reprotect that area same with the the v right in here and right up here wherever the swish is crossing you're gonna have to reprotect that a bit and then run it you have to do the same thing up here so you'll maybe just stick some aura mask in there or something whoo tricky tricky project but that is the project there and that's what is going to end up looking like so to tell you exactly what we ended up doing is we separated all the components so we could work with each one of them and then we i'm going to stop for a second and just give you an alternative as to way the way you can do this so you don't have to go in and reprotect the auramask stuff is we're going to close that we're going to switch back to drawing for a moment 2d and then i'm going to leave the swish turned on i'm just going to click off of it and then we'll just take the circle and i'm going to just make them active we can take i want the swish active so what we can do is take this part of the circle right there and we can control how can i do this we can take another line let's do it like this we're going to take this we're going to click it twice i'm going to hold the shift button down control and shift and over this little button right here i'm going to grab it and move it over to here in fact control z i'm going to take the swish and do it with that too so we're going to do that now i'm going to click it now i'm going to hold the control and shift button down that will enable me to copy it and move it just like that and what i'm going to do is i'm going to fix this up a little bit so you'll see you'll get this in just a second i'm going to take these scissors and i'm going to not the scissors i want to align i'm going to put a line right through here just right here now i'm going to space so i can restart the line i'm going to do the same thing right there now space now i'm going to close that take the scissors i'm going to cut that little end there and i'm going to cut this little end right here and then we can delete the lines now i'm going to explain to you exactly what i'm doing here in just a minute and i'll explain it to you right now so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to take that line and i'm going to move it over a little bit i'm going to take that line and move it over the other way a little bit and then i'm going to come in with the scissors and i'm going to cut cut cut cut cut cut okay and we're just going to take this part of the swish and we're going to put on a new layer just temporarily i'm going to copy to a now i'm going to move it to a new layer we're going to call this temp 2 temp 2. all right and we're going to change the color of it so i'm going to go to temp 2 i'm going to go up in the layers and hover over this little black box click the black box and change it to red there we go so now that one's red and now i can go to the we've got a little corner we're going to select this i'm going to come over to the move under transform objects the first icon and uh select that and then i'm going to just click right about there and i'm going to bring it down into this area right here and we'll bring it right about there so now it's overlapped and now the swish is a closed vector i can actually cut along the aura mask right there and that aura mask will stay connected to the it'll still protect the groove that's there i hope that made sense i'm not going to take this any further this is really long video and um it's a very tedious project so if you did this all the way around then what this will save you from is having to reprotect this part of the groove when you peel the aura mask away to spray paint it you'll have a strip of aura mask along there and it may leave a little bit of the wood exposed you just take a little paintbrush and just doctor it up right up to the edge so and then you'll take the m and the m let's just go ahead and cut the m so you need a separate m that's going to insert into it so what we're going to do is we're going to switch back over and we're going to split our screens and we're going to reset everything and i'm going to turn all the layers off except for the m to the big m i'm going to select it and the other layers get turned off so i can't see anything else swish needs to be off there we are and now we're going to cut the m out so that's going to be a separate tool path and what you have to make sure of is you actually create your g-code separately for this so what we're going to do is now we are going to do a profile cut i'm going to select that and i'm going to select the m and this time the profile has to be on the outside now i got to check something real quick we're going to before i do this i'm going to go back to this big m here i want to make sure okay i'm good i just want to make sure that i didn't do it in a profile mode okay so we got the profile the m is selected we're going to select profile and we're going to go on the inside right there we're going to select the middle radio button we're going to use a 1 8 v bit so what i would suggest is a compression bit for this uh one of the good ones that's out there is cody's cadence cnc compression bit and use that but we're just going to go with a 1 8 end mill for right now i'm going to select that and the cut depth is going to be z equals which is the depth of the material and that's going to be on the outside i apologize we will be on the outside of the m and because we're going to cut out the outside profile of the amp and then we're going to come down and we're going to name this uh big m cutout and we're going to call this uh 1 8 comp compression bit calculate it run it and there is the m and that m will be inserted into the pocket that we created on the sign if you got something out of this give me a thumbs up and if you did get something out of it maybe you can help support me buy me a cup of coffee literally down below is a link where you can buy me a cup of coffee you know help support what i do and helping you i would certainly appreciate it because it helps me i hope you learned a lot in this video and if you did whatever you did if you got a good takeaway from it put it down in the comments i'd love to know what you're getting from the videos that i create for you so i'm i'm looking forward to reading those comments and ted i hope that this gave you some guidance as to how to do this mousy tea sign there's a lot of time put in on this thing so brother i think you owe me a cup of coffee anyway that's about it i hope you have a great day better tomorrow and i hope your cnc journey is getting better and better every day i'm garrett with idc woodcraft and i will talk to you next time

Channel: CNC Routers, Beginners & Beyond - Garrett Fromme

Views: 4,600

Keywords: cnc for beginners, cnc router, Garrett Fromme, Vectric, how to design cnc router projects, designing cnc projects, bitmap tracing, tracing bitmaps, how to trace bitmaps, vcarve tutorial, vectric tutorial, aspire tutorial, aspire, vcarve, vectric, trace bitmap vcarve, trave bitmap aspire, bitmap tracing tutorial, difficult bitmaps, complex bitmap tracing, difficult bitmap tracing

Id: cfSktmZQrB4

Length: 65min 13sec (3913 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021