Intro to Carveco Maker for the complete beginner - Designing a Monogram

what's up everybody chris from full steam designs so recently i've been looking for some cnc software that just offered a little more um and i started looking into carveco now you may not be familiar with them but maybe you've heard of artcam and essentially that's what carveco is now carvco is software that's designed for major cnc manufacturers and it comes with a price tag that matches that but recently they started offering a couple other tiers maker and maker plus and those offer stuff for everybody from hobbyist levels to people that are professionals and just looking to up their game a little bit so today we're going to run through kind of a tutorial for maker and i don't just want you guys to think of it as a tutorial you know especially if you don't have the program uh what i want this to do is show you some different stuff that you can do uh there is a lot of stuff that i struggled to do with my other software and this does it easily so we're kind of just gonna run through some of the basics of that today now if you are interested in checking this out i'm going to put an affiliate link in the description down below make sure you check that out uh and not only is that going to help the channel out a little bit but it's going to save you guys some cash on the program too so without further ado let's roll that intro and jump into our tutorial [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right when you first open maker you're going to see this screen here and you'll be able to click on your recent models if you'd like you'll also have a notification at the top if there's an update that you need to do you can open a model or we can go here and start a new model and you have this box for your dimensions now the dimensions are unlimited there's no restriction on any of their programs uh you can do any size that you'd like to do for this demonstration i'm just going to do 24 by 24. you can change your resolution if you'd like select your units i'm going to leave it in inches and you can also select where you would like your zero position to be i'm going to do this lower left hand corner now when you first open it up you're going to be in the 3d view you have that and the 2d view just because you're working in the 3d view doesn't mean you're necessarily doing 3d work this is the screen that i like to work in and pretty much all of your buttons work between the two it's just whatever you prefer so we're gonna start by making just a couple circles we'll click the circle tool and you notice when i come to the middle it kind of lets me know that i'm in the middle like that so i can click and drag and if i know what size i want i just come over here and can put in either the diameter or if i'd prefer you can do radius click create and we're going to draw another circle in the center of that and we'll make this one 20. [Music] and now i'd like to add some text so we'll click on this text tool and i actually didn't mean to do this right now it's going to start typing on this curve which i didn't mean to do and i'm going to going to deselect that but this gives me a good opportunity to show you just how easy it is to do curved text with this program to get off of that i'm just going to click cancel here next to select curve and then it just gives me some regular text now normally i would go ahead and just hit f9 here and that would center whatever i have selected in my model uh but that is also a function of the screen recorder that i'm using to make this video so they're kind of conflicting right now and giving me some problems but just make sure you remember that f9 will center whatever you have selected that is a really helpful function key all right now i want to add a couple rectangles which are going to serve as like connection pieces above and below and i just draw to whatever size i want click create and i can just make sure it's selected and i can use the arrow keys to move it around to wherever i'd like it to be maybe something like that now i want to copy that i'll just hit control c and then control v and the nice thing about this is when it pastes it it pastes right on top of the old one i really like that uh so now i can move that down to roughly where i'd like it and you see it kind of snaps it'll snap to those points that are there but again you can use your up and down arrows if you prefer doing that all right now i want to add one more feature we're going to add a big m and you can see i had that box selected so it's trying to to snap to that box but i'm going to click cancel here and then it'll just put it down here we need to make this one a lot bigger let's try 14. right and that looks pretty good so click create and now we kind of need to simplify this a little bit you'll you'll notice that it's looking a little crazy probably because everything's just laying on top of itself so what we're going to do is use this trim tool here and i'll click that and i want to get rid of like these lines in the m that run through where i wrote maker but you'll notice that the scissors aren't opening and that's because this m here is a closed vector so what i can do is click ungroup vectors by going there and you'll see that it's purple and that means that it's grouped when you click ungroup it'll change to pink and you can also use ctrl u or control g control g will group it you see it changed purple control u will ungroup it and also you have a button here that you could click there's a lot of ways to do the same thing it's just whatever you feel most comfortable with so now we've got it ungrouped we can go back to our scissors and now you see that those scissors open and see they're trimming to this line here so it's not trimming to like the letters because this maker is still a closed group so we'll trim all those pieces and now we need to simplify the rest again we could come in and clip everything but that kind of takes a little bit of time to do so what i like to do to make this a little bit faster is fill these areas in with color i can select this outside and the inside part of this m and go up to bitmap and flood fill vectors and it's just going to use whatever color i have here selected as my primary color which i have black selected so flood fill vector and you notice nothing happened and all we need to do is we're on the material screen we need to switch over to this bitmap screen and now you can see that that's filled in so we can do this here too you can either click one piece hold shift and click another piece or you can come in from the right side click and drag over whatever you're looking to select and it'll select everything that you touch so now again we're going to say flood fill vectors and we'll do the same thing down on the bottom part of the m here now i want to do this circle we can do these two rectangles and then we can click the text and say flood fill vectors and now you see that's filled everything in in black so this is how i would like it to be cut out now all we need to do is just trace that so if i select everything and i click this button here bitmap to vector and normally what you would be doing here is you would import some sort of picture and you could trace it out to create your own vector from you know an image you found on the internet or whatever you can also import an svg if you would prefer to use those personally i know that's something that i like because i do have a lot of different svgs already so we don't really need to mess with any of these options you can like reduce the colors in an image just to kind of simplify it but since everything is black here we don't really need to worry about that now what i do want to do is create a new vector layer here so i'm just going to hit this little plus we can name it if we'd like i'm just gonna leave it vector layer one and then we're just gonna click create vectors now i can close this window i can come over here to this light bulb on our other layer i'll turn that off and now if i turn that down you'll see all we're doing is cutting out these traced areas here so all i'm doing with this is just turning down the color and again this is kind of just showing you a couple ways to get to the same end here you may be comfortable doing it the way that i did where i filled in the colors and then created a new vector or it may be easier for you just use the clip tool and you can come in and trim everything it's really about whatever you're more comfortable with i think this is a little bit faster though so now we have our vector created and we're going to make a tool path so we'll come over here to tool paths and we're just doing a 2d tool path so i'm going to click on this one here create profile toolpath and you're going to get all these options that pop up and i'll be honest with you this looks a little intimidating and maybe a little confusing but it's really pretty simple you just need to make sense of it the first thing we're going to do is come all the way down to the bottom and we're going to define our material and all you have to do is put in your thickness here let's say we're using a half inch piece of plywood you can select the top or the bottom to be your zero point i think probably most people are working off the top that's what i always do so we'll select top if you wanted to you could offset that that's not something that we need to worry about here so we'll just click ok and now you'll see how that changed color so if i look at this from the side that's actually that piece of material there with nothing cut out of it yet so now we've got some other options right above it here click this little arrow and you've got safe z this is your retract height i set mine pretty low because i run some low clamps honestly for a project like this i'd probably use pin nails so you could really set it even lower if you want but point one is what i feel comfortable with this home position over here is actually where your spindle is going to go to after the job is completed so when everything is done the spindle will raise up to 0.6247 inches and then it's going to go all the way back to zero in the y position and it's going to stay at 26 in the x position so if you're cutting around here and it finishes here it's going to come back to about here on your waste board so that's going to get out of the way of your material so you can remove it i know most of you guys are probably used to it just either shooting all the way back or maybe going to your home position zero zero so it's kind of nice now that we have the option to set where it's going to go all right now we can scroll up and we're going to click here to select what tool we're going to use and i'm going to keep this pretty simple we'll just click a 1 8 end mill click select now if you click this drop down here you've got that tool loaded in and it gives you options if you would like to change your feeds and speeds uh step down you know all the normal stuff it does have a tool number now tool numbers are important doesn't really matter what the tool numbers are but if you're using two different tools on one job and you wanted to send this to something like carbide motion uh and maybe you had a bit setter or like me you use the depth stop collars you could use two different tool numbers the program will stop after it's run the first tool it'll raise up allow you to change your tool out if you have the bit setter it'll go to the bit setter if not you can just start running that next tool but you just want to make sure that you're using two different numbers if you called two different tools the same number it's going to confuse it and it probably won't raise up and allow you to change it like that all right you'll see we can add lead-ins lead outs ramping and you also have an option for bridges and bridges are tabs they'll keep your material from moving around while it's being cut and you can do these automatically or you can click manual and then go around and double click and it'll add them in but i i like doing it auto and normally i'll just put two of them in so for length i put like 0.2 thickness 0.1 change this to 2d and just click add and you'll see now that it's added all of those tabs in now the last thing to do is just change our cutting parameters so you can have a start depth if you'd like for this it's going to be 0 which is going to be the top of our material and then finish will be 0.5 since it's a half inch thick and now all we need to do is click calculate now and i'm going to close this window here if we zoom in you'll see these red lines here and that's our actual tool path so like if you look where we've got those tabs that we added in on that last tool path it comes in gets to that tab raises up moves over comes back down and continues cutting this also will show you like how many passes that it's making so one two three four five that's because it's a half inch and we have each pass set at point one all right now one of my favorite things is we can click on tool path so now here is our toolpath that we just generated if i right click on this you can either click simulate toolpath or simulation control bar so let's click simulation control bar and now you get this little thing up here with a play button so if we click that you'll see how it actually cuts everything out it's actually going and making five passes at each area it's running very fast the simulation is running very fast that is all right and that's everything we can look at it from the front you'll see where it leaves areas for where those tabs are but that's cutting out exactly what we want so now all we need to do is save that now something i want to say here we didn't actually save this model yet you would save the model you're creating up here or you can click control s and you want to make sure you do that uh you know anything can happen with your computer it can crash or something windows can be a little crazy sometimes and start trying to do updates on you so it's important to save there but it's also important to realize that if you save this tool path here and don't save that you won't go you won't be able to go back and edit it so now we'll click save toolpaths and we only have one in here because we only use the one tool if you use multiple tools you would have multiple ones selected here but we've just got that one tool path so for me it's already got the correct post processor selected and there are a million options you can pretty much use this on any software but i'm going to use this carbide 3d uh shipoko inch because i have carbide motion set to run in inches you can see that it exports it as a dot nc and then we can put a file name in i'm just going to call it maker and all we do is click save now it doesn't close this window or anything but don't be afraid that it didn't save if you are concerned just click save again and you'll get this error message you know verifying that you want to overwrite that file um so that will tell you that it's saved we can just click no and then we can just close out of this so now if you were going to cut this out you would just load up carbide motion initialize your machine load that program and you'd be ready to go all right i hope you guys got something from that you know we barely graze the surface there is so much stuff you can do and keep in mind we were just using maker if you step up to maker plus you can do even more so even with maker you can do 3d work and they have a huge free collection of 3d reliefs but if that's not enough for you you can go on the internet download an stl it'll import right into the program and you'll be able to work with that you may have noticed on the opening screen that i had something that said jumanji i've always wanted to make a wooden jumanji board and i was able to find an stl for that uh downloaded it opened it up it worked great now i'm actually going to be able to make that and that was something i could never do with my software that i was using before all right thanks for checking the video out big thank you to these guys here for supporting me on patreon really appreciate it i'll put a link down in the description if you want to check me out on there and i'll see you guys over on this next video [Music]

Channel: Chris Powell

Views: 15,138

Keywords: cnc router, carbide create, carbide 3d, cnc routers, shapeoko, shapeoko xxl, carveco, carveco maker, carveco maker plus, carveco maker +, maker plus, maker, maker +, artcam, cnc software, tutorial

Id: Num5Zhx9txg

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020