Using FreeCAD for engraving text (shape strings) and pictures

[Music] in this video we're going to take a look at using a shape string to do engraving of text so alexander cool asked if i could create something to show you how to use shape strings um the text in freecad is not really something you can use for modeling or or routing cnc work but the shape string works beautifully it really is good so let me show you how it works i'm gonna use my script which basically just uh creates a new file and a part and a body and a sketch so that's all just done it's just a one click and i've talked about that before so i'm not gonna waste time on it this time so what we're going to do is i'm going to create excuse me i'm going to create a plaque that i can put some kind of engraving text on and the first thing i'm going to do is to center that plaque over this center point that way everything's working out the origin so that when i do my work every everything in the cnc is going to start from this center point so if i put text in here when i set up my tool i want it to be in the center of where the text is going to end up so if that makes sense we are going to constrain this guy i'm going to make it 150 so that we've got enough room to put a little bit of text in there and i'm going to make it probably 70 higher i think just to give us enough space to work with so that is my plaque and i am going to move this guy down and i am going to so i just took a second to start my mouse follower so you can see what i'm doing here and we're going to put that in the middle close up that sketch and turn it into a pad i'm going to reverse it 10 millimeters so that now this pad is on the x y plane so this the face of this pad so everything here went backwards from the x y plane just makes it easier for when we're doing the the sketch we have our basically a plaque or plate that we can put our text on to now i'll show you the shape string for that we have to go into the draft workbench and once the draft work bench fires up it puts this grid on the front don't worry about that grid it's just for uh placement and uh one thing i should show you is i am working with version two two six one one of version point one nine so that's revision number two two six one one a version zero point nine um definitely your version may make a difference but i always work in 0.19 because it's proven to be much better than the 0.18 which is the current release so i'm using the uh development release now of course it's under development so things may change as it goes along and you may find bugs in it but to be honest with you i've been using this for months and have managed to get around or work around anything that i found to be an issue and if i do find an issue i normally go over to the forums and help them or give them the information and they'll help me by fixing it so it's uh it works out very well so getting back to our shape string we're going to create a shape from a text string by using a specific font and a replacement the closed shapes can be used for extrusions and boolean operations so you can actually pad this text you can pocket this text so you can you can actually use it for modeling but when you're using it for engraving you don't need to pad it or pop or pocket it you can just use it as a shape string so that's what we're going to do here so i'm going to hit shape string and what it's going to do is it's going to ask me for a point to put it on so i'm going to start out by just putting it on this center point just roughly it doesn't matter because i'm going to move it afterwards and then it's going to ask me what the text should be and i'm just going to use the text of engrave just for interest i'm going to make this text i'm actually going to make it 15 hi to give us a chance to engrave it and now here's the the secret source so you need a font file to put in there which will give this um text it's shape and to get a font you can basically go to this website it's called www.dafont.com and most of these are free and if you're not sure you can look on over here you can see it says free for personal use and then you can download that so i've already downloaded this texas tango and that's what we're going to use in this case but this has many many many different um fonts that you can use so if you just look uh any of any of the fonts that they have in here um it's actually uh here i search for texas so i'm going to change that um i'm actually going to change it over here because that this is actually an ad this piece so you don't want to do it there so if i change this and say gothic maybe you'll see that there are lots of different gothic fonts that you can choose from and you don't want to use these ones up here because these these ones here are in an ad basically these are commercial fonts so they won't be free but if you look here these are all free for personal use shareware if it's shareware now you should really donate to it because you should really pay for it um so you can look down here free for personal use 100 free free for personal use so i recommend this as a as a starting point anyway so let's go ahead and see what you need to do so once you've unzipped your your font file what you're going to do is you're going to go into freecad fonts which is where i put mine so i put mine in my freecad directory under fonts and i have this texas tango and then when you see the files there's going to be a text file gives you the instructions there's going to be a a picture of it and then there's going to be the actual font file so this one is a otf file and i'm going to open that and nothing happened why did nothing happen because i haven't hit ok yet so it's it's fine to hit ok right now and let that font um pop in and then we can look at it and say well it's in the wrong place and it may be too big so i may want to change the size of it before you start doing any path actions creating the engraving path you want to position this and that's why i put this plaque here i'm not not literally going to engrave on a plaque of this size but i want to be able to see that it's sent and i want to be able to see that it's in the right spot one thing i suggest doing again make sure you've got the text as you want it to be so i recommend you measure this text so that you know roughly what the size is that way you can center it around the center of the lcs because there's no justification that you can't say i want it centered in the middle or above for now it's basically centered on this bottom corner so what i'm going to do is i'm going to measure that and again i it's an engraving so it doesn't have to be perfect but it you want it to be somewhere close so if i look there that distance is 178.5 and if i measure this way it is 27.1 tall so i don't mind the 27.1 but that 178 is gonna be bigger than my piece here um do i care yeah it's probably too big right now so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to the shape string and i'm going to change the size of it i'm going to make that 10. and remember i've showed you this before but sometimes when you change these parameters um they don't change until you tab off them so you tab off that and now everything changed so 10 looks like a nice size i'm quite happy with that now i want to move that guy over to the left to do that i can pop in here and look at my position literally just down arrow and here we go it's moving over now i measured that and i know it's 178.5 so if i know halfway of that is uh mental math is 85.89 so let's say 89 um so if i say go negative 89 oops that's not 178 remember i made the text smaller so it's actually only 120 so if i say 60 for that shape string it should be right in the center and then of course i need to remeasure this height because that changed too so i can get rid of these two dimensions i don't those those old sizes so the height of it is 17.2 so half of that would be roughly nine so i can say minus nine for my wide direction and that should get me right around the center there so everything looks good that looks central quite happy with that and of course if i wanted to if i wanted to tilt it i could do that so everything's going to be rotating in the z axis so whichever one of these is is positive is the axis that it's going to rotate in my z-axis comes straight out of the screen so uh you know we have x and y and so my z-axis i'm just turning those off my z-axis is coming straight out of the screen at me so if i do this and change this angle 10 degrees say you can see it's rotating around this point which is its its origin point and it's rotated 10 degrees so if i want to rotate it in a different direction if i want to rotate it in the x or the y plane i'll just change whichever axis is going to be positive so if i want to do it in the x plane i'm going to make that zero i'm gonna turn it this way so we can see it now if i change the angle to 10 degrees you'll see it comes up in the x plane so you you can manipulate this shape string to any way that you want it so if it's going on on a face rather than draw it directly on that face you're better off to manipulate this text so that it's sitting in front of the face um that's because of the topology issue so if you attach it to a face and then you change that model it's gonna lose its uh its origin and now that'll be a problem so the text is there looks good and what we want to do now is we want to create the engraving for this so the engraving is pretty easy we're just going to go into the path workbench and we're going to create a new job when we create the new job it pops up and says what do you want in this job well i don't want the solid i don't want this plaque i want that text so if i open this 2d i'm just hitting that down arrow i can include the shape string then when i say okay now this job has the shape string in it not the rest of this so when i do my engraving my machine doesn't know that all the rest of this exists i'm going to tell it where to start where to stop and i'm going to place a piece of wood or whatever i'm engraving in the right position okay so for the job what i'm going to do is i'm going to add an engraving tool i have this tool which i quite like to use i added these tools you won't see these in yours unless you add them so you'll have to do a new tool and add them in if you want to use them of course for engraving it's nice to use a v bit and when i do that i am going to remove the default tool and the reason i do that is because if you have multiple tools it's going to ask you for multiple questions about those tools so it's just easier to keep it clean simple right here you can change your it doesn't actually say this but this is the x and y feed and this is the z feed so the vertical feed and this is your spindle speed and you have to double click it so that you can edit it if you don't double click it i'll show you what happens so i'm going to say that can go 150 because it's not really doing a lot vertical and i'm going to engrave it at 250. so if i don't double click it and i hit three it changes my my view changes because i'm actually changing view instead of changing um this text over here so you have to double click it to make sure it goes so that that's something that caught me out first i was like what what happened but i figured it out and it's fairly simple so with that being said i now have a job and i want to do engraving so i'm going to go up here i'm going to pick engrave and i'm going to tell it what you want to do so again because i picked i've deleted the default tool i don't have more than one tool here so it's gonna automatically pick the right tool so that helps us doing that this is my clearance height and this is my safe height i usually use five and three so those are perfect that's exactly what i want and then my depth it some for some reason it defaults to a 0.1 engraving which you know if you have an uneven surface that it starts engraving on you're not going to see anything so the start depth zero that's where we want it to start i'm going to do this a three millimeter deep um engraving notice again when you change that it doesn't look like a change but if i click here then it suddenly has changed so it's all good and then i just noticed my my mouse is not showing up again so just bear with me so i just had to restart that uh mouse software because if some reason it it died but we're good again now so again you want your minus three and then what i'm doing is i'm actually clicking on these blue things to change these because you they're grayed out you can't do any changes there the reason for that is it's it's calculating this so one thing this does automatically is it makes that step down the amount that it goes down at a time so the depth of cut for each time it makes it equal to the tool diameter which i don't think i'd ever do that but that's okay um i'm going to make mine two millimeters as a step down and why did i make it two millimeters well the reason is i want it to be two because i'm going down three so the first cut will be two millimeters deep and then a finish cut of one millimeter deep so it's only gonna go down to three the first cut will go two and the next one will go down one so then we'll have a nice cut through and then a clean up and i'll show you that i'm not going to show you the whole simulation because it takes a little while but i'll show you how it looks when it does that i'll show you the e maybe so again i'm going to apply that and you can see that it's applied um that you can see that it's applied because you can see all of the movement of the tool there so that looks good i'm going to close that and i'm going to simulate this so you can you guys can see it i'm trying to keep that window shut it keeps popping up and when i simulate it so i only have one job so there's there's only one job there and it's there's only one uh operation which is to engrave so i'll start the simulation i'll show you the e and then i'll show you the end of it you can see with the e that it's going around the outside and then it goes around again and that's when it drops to the second depth and then actually this one's going fairly fast so we might be able to watch a little bit more of it but you can see it's going around each letter twice that's because it goes around at two millimeters deep then it goes around at three millimeters deep so i get a one mil cut to finish up and basically that is how you do an engrave with a shape string now that shape string can be any font and can be on any surface and the way that i'm managing it with this strategy is i'm basically telling it where it starts and where it ends in depth and i've placed it where i want it to be around the the coordinate system so i can set up my job put my zero zero over the center of where i want that word to be engraved and then kick it off and we should be good to go so that actually uh the simulation was actually quicker than i expected so you got to see the whole thing but you could see it went round each letter twice what it would be doing is it's cutting with a v cutter around the edge of these letters so they're going to be a little wider than it would appear so where these two are close together you might actually have some breakthrough and you're probably going to have some breakthrough right here so again you can look at spacing for the font and that kind of stuff uh or look at a font that has wider spacing if that's something that you want to make sure doesn't happen around the v and the e i think you'd be fine and around the a and the v i think you'll be fine but this r and this a and this n i think they're gonna break into each other now generally if you're doing this in wood the engraving is is pretty quick to do on the machine and it's worth just cutting one on a piece of scrap just to see what it looks like and if it actually makes what you wanted it to make so that is it hopefully uh that will help you with engraving with a shape string okay so that's how you engrave a shape string or some text what happens if you want to engrave a picture so what you do is you import an svg and i'll show you how that works so i'm going to import an svg and i'm going to bring it in here now notice when i imported it i should just show you that again to make sure it says svg as geometry not just a regular old svg so it's coming in as geometry if you find that your svg doesn't have any geometry it's probably because you don't have a path around the drawing and you need to do that you need to create that path around the drawing so that it will see some geometry some svgs will be they'll work right off the bat some you're gonna have to take into inkscape and create that path so i can show you how to do that if you're interested i'll do that at the end of this video that way if you're not interested in it you don't need to watch to the end okay first things first what happened when i imported this thing is it brought it in as paths each one is a path and so if i zoom in here a little bit you'll see as i'm highlighting them each element here is its own path and that means that i now have a bunch of paths um that make up my little penguin guy so what i'm going to do is i'm going to convert those paths into a sketch because i want them to be a sketch so that we can do the engraving to do that we select the paths all of them and we're in the draft workbench and we go to this guy here which says convert bi-directionally between draft objects and sketches and just click it once and it created 10 sketches and what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn off by hitting the spacebar i'm going to turn off all the paths so these are now all the sketches and it's great i have 10 sketches but that's a bit awkward to work with so what we're going to do now is we're going to switch workbenches into the sketcher workbench i'm going to select all of those sketches so they're all selected go into sketch and say merge sketches and now i get sketch 11 so i'm again i'm going to turn off these 10 sketches and now i have sketch 11 which is our penguin now from here what we're going to do is we're going to move our penguin up to the origin because that's what we want him to be so we can position him and sketch 11 i'm going to actually call it i'm going to label it as penguin just for because so that we don't mix up with any of these other sketches or parts or anything else and then i'm going to move this um up i want to get it to move left first now i want to get it roughly in the middle because that's where i want to set up and start from so i'm going to move my y move it up and what i'm looking for is to get that roughly centered so if i look i have not really centered that looks pretty good i can do the same thing again i can measure him from there to there and that will give us one dimension 50 let's say 54. then i can measure him from let me just turn off that pad okay and then we can measure them from here to here and press the measure measure measure so he's like 54 by 50. so if i turn those guys off and now i get back to my penguin sketch so 54 would be 27 and 50 would be 25 that's about center now so that should be good that's what it looks like looks like my 26 is better where i measured it might not be quite center that looks more centered to me i'm looking at these these grid points so it could actually i think we're good there so basically what i'm doing when i set up my um cnc i'm going to be looking at the center point as being where my um penguin arrives or where he gets engraved i'll turn my pad back on so you can see roughly where he's sitting on that pad and then it's embedded there so that's where he's gonna end up on that pad so what we'll do now is we'll create a job in the path workbench and we'll create a job and we're going to say 2d and we want the penguin sketch we don't want all these other sketches we just want penguin let's say okay put it back on the top so we can see what's happening and we want tools i'm going to add that tool back in [Music] happens to be the one we're using for this i'm going to delete that one because i don't need it and i'm going to say ok and then i am going to add an engrave for this guy it's got the right tool my height's gonna need to adjust again so if i want to do that same get him three mil deep step down two mil i'll get two cuts around him my penguin is on there apply say okay up there again bring this guy over here zoom in let's do our little guy here and you should see that it's quite happily engraving that old guy and runs around the outside shape and drops down to the two mill this is the outside shape of that then it's going to step over and i'll do you can actually see the on these red parts you can see where the tools go on that's where it raises up so i'll raise up and it'll move and if you look at the arrow direction that shows you where it's going to move from so when it gets to here it's going to move up and it's going to go up to that beak and do that beak and it's going to move over here do the eyes and we'll get to a finish point so there you have it it's uh engraved the penguin and all that's good and i'm not going to keep the cut files i just say cancel as i said before these simulations can take longer than actually cutting in the wood so i didn't make you watch the whole thing because it took a little while but i think the um the simulation is good to show you essentially what's going on um you know as a test so i'm just double checking out those depths right there now i don't know if you want to see that cut in wood if you do leave a comment i'll actually uh do a cut for you i'm not going to do it in this video i'll do it in the next one so if you're interested in seeing this or the engraved lettering cutting the wood feel free to leave me a comment below and i will take care of cutting it for you on video so as i said that the next thing i'm going to show you is how to get from a jpeg of that penguin um to a par file in an svg um and bring that into freecad and i'm going to show you that in inkscape so i'll show you that next so we're going to quickly convert a jpeg and to do that we're going to import the jpeg so import it that penguin picture say okay just accept the defaults we're going to make the page the same size as the picture zoom works a little different on this guy and then we're going to go into the path and trace the bitmap we're going to use if we do it this way we lose his little beak so we're going to use edge detection update it gives us a beautiful edge so we're going to say okay and then we're going to close that and you can't see it but it is actually there so now i'm going to do just quickly i am going to create a new layer i'm going to call that layer 2 and i am going to select this and say layer and move it to layer 2 say move then i'm going to close layer two and close layer one open layer two so my little guy's on layer two so what i'll do is i'll close that i'll open that i will select this guy and delete him out there now because we don't need him anymore so then i'm also going to delete layer one so now all i've got is layer two and then i'm gonna select this and i'm just gonna take path and i'm going to do object to path and what that will do if i select it now with this path selector you can see all the joins in the path i'm actually going to go path simplify or it does just makes less of those joints so that's basically it we've taken it from a jpeg to a path and then we're just going to say file save as and we're going to save it as our penguin svg and i'm going to replace it boom done and that's exactly what you want to have left and that's what we make our drawing out of so if you've enjoyed this video please consider subscribing if there's something you would like to see just leave a comment let me know what it is and i'll consider making a video on that thanks for watching bye you

Channel: Adventures in creation

Views: 36,215

Keywords: FreeCAD, CAD, CAM, CNC, CNC router, Design, Maker, DIY, Engraving, Arts, Crafts, howto, tutorial, computers

Id: juzDSwGya1E

Length: 32min 31sec (1951 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/richcournoyer]

Can it do Curved Text?

[u/Numerolophile]

Thanks, Im trying to port my brain over from 360 to freecad and have to relearn so much. I find freecad is excessively parametric. you cant just draw a line of x length, you have to draw a line, then dimension it. PITA but the only way to go now that 360 has descended to the dark (baitware) side.