V-Carving Photos in Carveco Maker

hello and welcome to this carve Cove maker tutorial my name is Leighton and today we're going to be taking a look at turning a photograph into a relief and then we go into machinist using something called photo V carving and I'll show you how you can do this some people think that this is sort of a bit of a black art it's pretty easy to do to be completely honest and I'm going to show you how you can do it and what to watch out for and just give you some tips on how to create these types of V carvings so if I take a look there and here you can see that this is the picture that I want to turn into a V carving and a lot of people say that you need to use the right picture I'll be completely honest whenever I've done this pretty much most pictures seem to work as long as you follow a few simple rules you may need to tweak settings but there's literally two settings that you would need to tweak I'll show you how to do it so here you can see one that I created earlier this year it's just a picture that I've done for my wife and this is the sort of thing that I'm talking about so if I were to zoom in on this maybe this good-looking chap at the top here which is me you can see that this is actually just a piece of MDF it's a piece of metal of mine so it's got white laminate on the top of the MDF so all that's happening here is that the V bit is going across and just scouring the whites office and it gives it this image effect so you can actually see the image if you look close up it doesn't look that great it's when you look far away that you can actually sees now what you need to do is make sure that you get these white areas because that's what gives it the contrast okay if you go too deep so you can see there in the bottom left here there may have been a bit of dust or something underneath the material sorry it's gone a little bit deeper here and you can see that it's not showing any of the detail so what you need is these white areas for this particular piece which show the detail so you'd need that contrast so if you start to get something that looks like the bottom left it's not working because it's not going to you're going too deep and too close together so it's not going to give you the desired effect okay so let's zoom a so you can have another look at that okay so this is actually hanging up in my hallway at the moment so let's take a look at carve cone maker and I'll show you how you can make these types of images so as I said I'm going to go to let's go to a new model now if you take a look at this image that I want to photo V carve you can see that this is square okay now what I'm going to do is deliberately do this so it's it's it's not right it's not correct and I'll show you how you can get round it this is just if you set up the wrong size for the model okay so let's go to carve code make Evan I'm going to create a new model and I'm going to give it a width and the height so I'm going to give it a width of 12 inches and a height of 24 inches now I know that this just needs to be about 12 inches square so I'm making sure that I'm even getting it basically even the height I'll show you how you can make this small okay resolution I'm just going to crank that right the way up to the top set my datum or my origin I'll just set that to be the bottom left so you can change it by clicking any of the four corners or the same time the eunuchs I'll just do this in inches and select okay so what this does it opens of Pafko maker places you within the 3d view okay so what we need to do is to import that image name maybe this is a little bit different if you're used to using the previous program where you would just literally open the image and then you would enter a figure now personally I prefer to do it this way because you have more control over the relief so you can resizes the older method it had that aspect ratio a lot so there is no way that you could resize it if you wanted to so I'd rather do it this way personally so before you go to relief and then select import and then import again select that come down to there which is the image and select open now what this will do it will open that image place it as a relief and as floating clipart now if I were to zoom out you can see that this is absolutely huge at the moment now that's because it's got a width of 2 Faiers and by 2,000 inches so the program believes that this was created in inches it's actually two thousand pixels so what we need to do is just resize this to the size that we actually want so if I were to change the width of that now if I were to do it at the moment and change that society 11 and then select apply you'll see that's it just makes it smaller in the week but it's because I haven't got the aspect ratio locked so if I just undo that and if you undo something it will take you out of the transform tool so click the clip art again so anything that is blue like this is floating clip arts so I can just grab that and I can just move it around okay go back into the transform tool to do that you can press T on the keyboard or select here and that will take you back in there so let's turn on the lock this time so here you can see I've got this padlock so I'm going to change the width of that to be let's say eleven point five and then select apply a you notice that this goes really small and you'll see that's my zero playing is really small here so now with this selected what I can do is press f9 on the keyboard and that will place it in the center of that model and now if i zoom in you can see that it's been placed in the center of that model now I can just move that there so if I grab it you can see that it floats around if i press alt on the keyboard it gives me a 90 degree angle snap so I can just start bringing that down to around about there and let go now if I were to rotate this around you can see that this is really really high you can move it up or down like so now the trick to doing these photo V carvings is the height and the step-over of the tool what I've learned in the past is that the height needs to be AB 840 fail or 1 millimeter you can sort of deviate from that say one point two millimeters or say 50 FeO but normally it tends to be a roundabout that sort of size I'll be completely honest with you all you see have problems doing these and that was because I used to set the highs and around three millimeters and he wouldn't turn a properly and it would take me quite a while to actually do these photo V carvings so what you need to do is set the height to be around about forty thousands of an inch or one millimeter if you work it in metric so let's set it to 0.04 and then select apply okay so that's all that you need you don't need it to be massively deep or anything the V beats just going to just glide over the top of this and this is what's going to give it the effects of an image okay so when you're done with that what you can do is either press ENTER on the keyboard and it will place this relief data or you can come down to the bottom here and select paste so that will place that down okay so there's a couple of things that I need to do with this name so this is entirely up to you if you want to do this I tend to do this because it gives me a better end result which is to smooth this relief a little bit so if we go over to here to smooth relief click on it and you'll get this strength slider bar now if you go all the way to the top you can see it really smooths it out and this isn't what you want at all because you lose a lot of the detail in the relief and this won't work okay so what you need to do is just do this really really slightly I normally do maybe a bit 10% and that should do you want to still keep a lot of the detail in there so if I apply that and cancel its all that that does he just gets rid of any sharp areas on this relief now what I need to do is I need to sort the model they obviously you may have set this up properly I just wanted to show you this just in case you setup the wrong sized model so what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a box so if I draw a box I'll just hover over the into the bottom left there you see how the cursor changes so that's telling me that it will snap or lock onto that bottom left hand point so if I go there and then let's go up to a bit there now you can see that it actually want least to be 12 inches by 12 inches so that seems to be right if you want anything to be any other size you just type in the size is there so if I select create and then cancel that now with that vector or that rectangle selected what I'm going to do is crop this relief so if I go to model and then select crop what it will do it will remove the area at the top okay so now if you take a look on the right hand side you can see that the artwork is 12 inches by 12 inches so he's made the right size so just a little tip if you need to make something smaller though just draw a vector and then you can crop the model okay so I'll delete that effector and this is ready to be machines pretty much name now what I've done I've just created a little bit of a border around this because I like to have a little border where the V bit is finishing and it gives you this nice sort of stitching effect where the tool is stepping over right so this is ready to be machine then so to do these to machine them what you do is go to tool puffs and then what you want to do is create a 3d tool path which is a machine relief tool path so if I select that just move that's over the area to machine going to machine the whole of the relief and then finishing options click to select let's turn off my metric tools and use an image tool and I'm going to use let's say this one in the quartz ring 90 degree VB now another thing to bear in mind is the actual V beak that you use if you were to use something that's larger than 90 degrees obviously because of the angle of the V it won't be able to go down very deep so you won't get that contrast so I tend to normally use a 90 degree to do these I've never actually tried to use a 60 degree but I would imagine that that would give you an even better finish so I'm going to use this 90 degree click the Select and make sure that you've got rats to run as the strategy and what I would tend to do is normally give this an angle if you do this straight it normally doesn't look as good so what I'll do I'll just set an angle up now you can do these at whatever angle that you like okay so I'm going to just do it at 45 degrees and then let's define the material let's say the material half an inch feet okay and you can see the model thickness is forty one favor so select okay and if I rotate around you can see that's the material has been set up now I'm not missing a rain we've pretty much one of the most important factors when doing this which is the step over I'm going to just calculate this and see what it does to start with so if I calculate now and what I'm going to do is right-click on the machine relief and I'm going to simulate these so this is the type of thing that it does so the V beat is following that concert of the photograph I'll just fast forward this you can see that's it doesn't look very good at the moment and that's all to do with the step over okay so what we need to do is we need to change the step over because this isn't working so if we click on the drop down here for the tool you can see that the step over is point free one two five so let's change that to it's eight points who see what that does and then let's simulate this again there's a lot of trial and error especially with this step over so you have to play a bit with it a few times just to make sure that you get the right step over so let me fast forward this again so you can see that it's starting to look right but even though it's still not the right step over so let's change it to let's say point 1 now this may be too close together so if I reset that and simulate button ok so that's not looking too bad at the moment that's quite good they can see if you zoom out you can see the kids face and the dog maybe just tweak it just at such let's say 0.09 for that and calculate so if I reset that simulate that again you can see that that looks quite good now if I wanted to I could add a depth color to that so apply that you change the material he'll be not gold let's try a wooden let's try it a little bit smaller already set that and simulate all tool puffs that seems to be a little bit better I think I'm happy with that so you can see what's happening is the vbt is just going in to those areas on the photograph and it's leaving you with this picture now I'll show you what happens if you do this too close together so if I delete the simulation they shown to step over to be 0.01 okay now this is going to look awful if I simulate that you can see what's happening is it's going over it too close and it's not giving you that contrast okay so if I turn off the depth color you can see it's basically just carving a 3d image so you might as well just do this with the ball nose so let's make this a little bit higher just going to see what this looks like so it's a lot of trial and error with this step over okay so that looks quite good so I think I'm going to leave it later zero point zero seven inches step over so I can add the depth cover to that if I want so you can see that that's giving me the effect that I want it now it's entirely up to you if you want to do the border like this what you could do is if I just delete this simulation I could have kept the vector that I created or I could go through vector and then create and then relieve boundary I'm just going to click create if I turn on the vectors here toggle vector visibility it gives me a vector so that's what I've just created I've just basically created the boundary of room around that relief so now the area to machine rather than the whole relief I can do this as selected vectors now if you wanted to you could go really advanced with this and you could create a vector around the boy and beasts dog and then do two photo V carvings and have one going in one direction and one going in the other so you could just assign it to vectors okay so if I select to calculate name okay so let's do this inside the vector and then select calculate now so if I simulate these you can see that it's not machining but a slide that anymore so it's leaving me with this nice border so let's fast forward this okay so that looks quite good okay so that's basically how you do a photo V carve in carved oak maker so let's close that and I'll show you how you can save this to your CNC so if I go to tool paths and then go to save tool paths and then other I need to do is literally Broz and let's say we go to the desktop let's call this be carved photo let's go in there let's call the boy and dog and then select open so it's just going to save into that folder and then all that I need to do is find the Machine file format so this is basically convertor from this program carve khomeini cat into a format that your CNC machine will understand so lots and lots of different what we call post processors here and more than likely to find your machine on here so what I'm going to do is just do let's say I'm at free or Mach 4 and then select save so if I find that folder name and then take a look in there you can see that I've got this tap 4 which is just literally commands and coordinates telling my machine hey to machine this so if I right-click on it if you haven't got this options it's just open select open weave and then use WordPad or any word processing application and it will just open this file and you can take a look at it okay so that's basically this job ready to sync to the CNC machine okay so that brings an end to this tutorial I hope that you found it useful it's very easy to do providing that you follow a few simple rules first one is to make sure that your thickness is correct normally about 40 faizon's of an inch or one millimeter you can adjust that to suit but don't go too deep will not work make sure that you use the correct V bit so you want to normally use something that's a bit ninety degrees or maybe as sixty something that I've never tried myself and then what you need to do is adjust the step over so the step over is the most important one you need to make sure that you get that correct so you need to sweep that and so you see the detail properly if you go too far then you'll remove a lot of the deets oven you might as well just use a ball nose tool to machine it's interesting machine afridi relief okay so I hope that you found that useful and thank you very much for watching and hopefully I'll see you on the next tutorial take care good bye you

Channel: Carveco

Views: 13,232

Keywords: vbit, carving, carveco, maker, tutorial, woodworking, routing, wood, sign, signmaking, v-bit, toolpath, tooling, artcam, v-carving, express, photo v-carve, photovcarve, vcarve a photo

Id: eocEEUYF0Wo

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 23 2019