Vectric - Stacked Text Template

in this video we're going to further explore the concept of stack text but at the same time also look at some other very important ideas regarding setting up a template file so this is a file that you can load into the software and easily edit to make a variation on a particular theme so here we're going to set up a part so that it would be easy to make one of these wedding plaques with the stack text but allow you to quickly and easily change the name and date on it for different couples and different events some of the key ideas we'll touch on will be how to use the vectors and the layers in order to manage those vectors so that we can assign them particular tool paths and also here we can use the document variables so that it'd be easier for us to program different depths depending on the design we had all this is designed to kind of semi automate the process so that all you have to do is make the edits to the vectors and then reapply the tool path very very quickly to create another version of this particular design like to offer some thanks to a couple of forum users who have done some very nice examples of this that I was able to learn some things from one of the forum users Moebius and also mike queen have done some nice things with this a number of other people have taken this idea and made some very nice finished parts with it as well so let's start by opening a new copy of the car pro so let's click on the icon to create a new file and for this part I'm going to set up a width of 25 inches height of 9 inches material thickness of 0.75 and we'll work with our datum position in the center for our vector layout and go ahead and hit OK now as we start to create our vectors we're really going to make sure we've managed our layers very well with this example so I'm going to start by renaming layer 1 and I'm going to call it outer order and we'll actually change that to be a blue color and hit close now that's my selected layer so when we come over and click on the rectangle icon here with my anchor point set in the sin zero-zero I'm going to create a rectangle with radiused external corners with a half-inch radius and the size of this I'm going to make 24 by 8 inches and hit create let's go ahead and hit close now next I want to create another vector for my inner border so I'm going to come and click on the drop down menu for the layers here click on the button to add a new layer this time I'm going to call this inner border I'm going to change the color of this one to be red color doesn't really matter using that to differentiate them and hit close now that's my current layer so if we come back to the draw rectangle tool I'm gonna take the same parameters up the top here but this time I want to do an internal radius corner of half an inch and I'm going to set the size of this to be 23 by 7 so basically an inch smaller in width and an inch smaller in height and hit create and closed and so now you can see that's a different color because it's on a different layer we've got these internal radii and that's a half inch smaller on each side of the part next we'll click on the drop down again and another new layer which we'll call drill holes we're going to change the color of this and maybe we'll make it kind of a violet color there and hit close what I want to do is snap my drill holes into the Centers of these radii so I'm going to come over click on draw a circle we'll enter a diameter of a quarter of an inch and I'm just going to come over until my mouse snaps and notice it changes there to a crosshair show me it snapping to that center position and I can just click to create that vector there now if I wanted to I could come down and click and create them in the other corners but I want to show you a couple of other techniques we could use with the snapping so I'll just go ahead and hit close another way we can use the snapping is to drag a copy of a vector so if I click on that to reselect it come over the center and I'm going to hold down the control key on the keyboard so that when I click now and drag the software's going to make a copy and again you can see that snapping to different points and what I need to look for is the cursor changing there so that when I let go with the control key held down I create a copy there which is snapped as well another way that I could make these in the same positions over on the other side because the part symmetrical is to select them both come and click on the mirror selected objects icon so flip about Jobcentre create a mirrored copy and click on the flip horizontal button and hit close so really they're just showing you a number of different ways that we can create those in the right position either once we've already got some data or as I've started with there by drawing a circle and snapping that into the drawing now we're going to create the different vectors for the text that we're going to need for our sign this is going to represent a last name which will be in the background the four names or first names which will be in the foreground and then a separate set of V car text which will have the date of the event on it so again I'm going to use the layers to manage these so I'm going to come up click add a new layer we'll call this last name text I'm gonna leave it black in this case and so we'll just hit close there and we can see that is selected and for this last name text I want to create a rectangle that will govern its position in size so I'm going to click on the icon for a rectangle I've already worked out where I want this to be and how big so I'm going to enter a value for the Anchor Point in the center of X zero Y 1.25 and a width of 21 and a half and a height of 4 and hit create and close so that shows me what the governing size and position is going to be for this text as long as I select that when I create the text and use this option here which is draw text within a vector box so whatever vector I've got selected when I click on this the software will automatically pick up its size and position so the font I want to use here is going to be gaudy old star so I'm going to click on the listen hit G which will take me down to the fonts beginning with G and then we should just be able to look within the list and choose the one we want there Gary the old style if you don't have that font you'll just have to choose one of your own or something that's appropriate here I'm going to enter the text for the last name and this is something that I'm going to be able to edit for other designs if I want to in this case we're going to use the last name of the couple which is Montague I'm going to use the margin size to be none and vertical stretch is going to be stretched characters on both of these so I really want this text to fill right to the edges of that vector that I've got if I hit apply you can see that's exactly what's happening there so I have no margin in between that vector and the text and now we're stretching the characters right up to fill that area if that looks okay we can hit close and at this point I can actually select that rectangle and delete it I don't need that because the software will remember with this text when I select it and go into here the value and position that I assigned to that originally by having that vector selected so I can delete that now and we can continue with the next set of vectors now we're going to create another new layer which we'll call first named text it closed there and just going to deselect the text there to make sure we don't pick that up and this time I'm just going to create regular text because I want the size of this to be able to extend to really feel whatever the names are so the text for this is going to be the two first names of the couple so I'm going to put Romeo and Juliet and this time I'm going to go with French scripts so I'm going to hit F on the keyboard go with French script MT now the text type for this I'm going to make two and the anchor position for this I want to be at X 0 Y naught point 5 and let's hit apply and see where that is so that looks okay to me I like the position of that I can obviously this for each individual design as I want to but if that looks good then we can hit close now the last set of text is going to be the date which is going to feature underneath here so again I'm just going to deselect that I'm gonna click on this add a new layer and I'm going to call this layer V carve text now this will always be used as is I won't need to do any additional edits to this which I will need to do to the names as we'll see later in this example so I'm going to change the color of this to orange and we'll hit close there and now making sure I've got nothing selected will click on regular text again in this case now we're going to add the date that we want here so let's go ahead and into 17th of March 1350 obviously this is a bit of a guess as to what this would be and for the font I'm gonna choose a OD old-style again so the anchor for this is going to be at X 0 Y minus 1 point 7 5 sorry minus 2 point 2 5 there so X 0 Y minus 2 point 2 5 and we're going to make the text for this one inch high and hit apply so I think I'm just getting my values mixed up there apologies for that I think what I actually want is 2.75 so that's X 0 y -2 point 7 5 and if we hit apply I can see that's in a little bit better position as I say these are positions that are and sizes that I pre worked out but obviously you could stretch these and adjust them as you want for each individual design let's go ahead and hit close on the text form there now and just click to deselect that so this set of vectors will represent those that we're going to edit if we want to create a different version of this sign with different names and different dates on it so I do need to save this as is but then we're going to go through the process of actually welding the text together and calculating the tool paths so we can also save the tool patent with our template file as well so let's come up to file save as and in the project folder I'm going to call this stacked text template and then as we create the tool paths on this we'll go ahead and save over this version of it so we've got everything we need in it so it's it saved there and you'll be able to find that in the project folder now at this stage I want to start making some copies of our text so that we can appropriately weld it together to allow us to create the tool path so that some of the text will appear to be in the foreground and some will appear to be in the background there's a fairly straightforward process to this but it's important that you don't miss out any of the steps now you'll remember we've put our name text on two layers last name text and first name text now the first step is to select the vectors on the first name text layer so I can do that from the layer manager here by clicking on the little notepad and going to select layer vectors if I close that now I can right mouse click with those selected I can choose the option to copy 2 layer and we're going to create a new layer that I'm going to call top text so this will be the text that appears to be on the top you can change the color if we want so maybe we'll make that a green color and for the moment I'm going to make that invisible in inactive and hit OK next I want to select the text that's on the last name layer so again we can do that by using the layer manager click on the last name text notepad there select layer vectors right mouse click copy 2 layer important to copy not to move new layer that I'll call bottom text and perhaps we'll give that another color there maybe we'll make that kind of an equi color and I'm going to make that invisible and inactive as well and hit the ok button now at this stage I'm actually finished with those two layers the last name text and the first name text but as I said before it important to leave those as they are because if we want to edit this plaque later I need to make sure I keep those original two sets of text because otherwise I won't be able to edit them once they've been welded so I'm just gonna switch off the last name text in the first name text layer and hit close now I'm going to come back to the layer manager I'm gonna scroll down and I'm gonna switch on the top text layer here and I'm gonna select that layer to make sure that that is now my current layer so that any editing operations will ensure that the vectors stay on that layer now if we zoom in you can see something that's characteristics of a lot of script fonts so script fonts that is on to look like handwriting and so they'll have the kind of tails and the sweeps and things in them but they're still separate letters so when you get an overlap like this area here there are actually separate vectors and this could cause problems when we come to tall paths them so it's important we go ahead and take care of that so if I just select this text and click on the icon to zoom to fit what I'm we need to do is convert this to curves and then weld the appropriate pieces together so with that text selected I'm going to click on the icon to convert objects to curves and then I need to make sure that I deselect any internet islands otherwise they will disappear when we do the welding so I'm just going to hold shift down and deselect the inside of the ease our nose the J the L and the E and in this case I think that's all the inner islands now with all those outer vectors selected I can click on the icon here to weld selected vectors and if we zoom in you can see then that's just got rid of those overlapping areas so now these are just a single solid vector so it's just hit F on the keyboard to fit that in I'm gonna click and then just drag to select all those vectors and I'm just going to hit the icon to group selected objects now what I'm going to do at this stage is take a copy of these and put them on to the bottom text layer in order for us to tall path around the bottom text I need to go around both the Victor's that appear to be in the front and also the vectors in the background so I need a combination of both of those so with these selected I'm in a right mouse-click mess a copy to layer bottom text and we shouldn't see much happen because we copied them and the bottom layer or bottom text layer is currently switched off so now having welded this set of vectors together I'm going to undraw the top text layer draw the bottom text layer and select that so that it's current so we know we've got one set of grouped vectors here we converted those two curves and weld them in order for me to get an appropriate weld between two sets of texts like this again so it respects the inner islands I need to take the other set of text which is still text convert that to curves and group that so with that selected and a click on the icon to convert objects to curves and I'm going to click on the icon to group selected objects so now I've got two groups of vectors not text anymore this has been converted to curves and grouped so now once I've got these two groups I can select one shift and select the other click on the icon to weld selected vectors and the software will automatically respect the inner islands of those two sets of vectors now immediately that I've hit the weld icon before I click on anything else and deselect those vectors I should come over and click on the icon to group them together again so that they're easy for me to select with a single mouse click from the 2d view so now let's switch back on the top text layer close this and we've got all the vectors we need to start calculating our tool paths at this stage is probably worth saving the file again though so I'm just going to go up to file save and so we can overwrite that there so and again now we're going to calculate the toolpath and save those in it too so we've got this sort of genuinely editable template file so if we go over to the tool path tab we'll click on the icon there I'm going to click page down on the keyboard in order to tile the windows horizontally now come over and click on the set button for the material setup and it's important to note at this point if you do plan to machine this example that you should make sure you recalculate all the tool paths using parameters and settings that are safe and appropriate for your machine whatever tooling you have available and obviously the material that you plan to cut it into as well so for this job I'm going to leave Z 0 set to the top and the block material thickness three quarters of an inch that's fine and I set the XY datum to the lower left now for our machining of course you can leave that anywhere that's appropriate for you and the rapid gaps and home position the cloak I so we can click the button there now for the text or the layered text we're going to use two V carving tool path so we're going to use a V bit so we can really get into the spaces between the letters and then we're going to use a second tool within that V carving though so that we can clear out the majority of the material with a flat cutter before going back with the V bit now to determine the depths of this and to make it more customizable for future edits I'm going to use a feature that allows us to input our own document variables and these are variables that I could then edit on the fly and recalculate the tool path later and it'll pick up those values so to enter my own document variables I'm going to come up to edit and come down to document variables now the first document variable I'm going to create here I'm going to call TD and I'm going to that just means top depth so that's the depth of the my top text there and we'll start with a value of 0.1 of an inch for that and hit create the second variable I'm going to create is called BD I'm also going to make that point one as well at the moment and that just stands for bottom depth so that's in effect the what the heights or depth of the bottom text will be so let's hit create there so the moment these both have the same values but you'll see later how I'm going to be able to come back and edit those and Hale that will allow me to recalculate all the tool paths without having to individually go in and change each one so we've set up the document variables there we can hit the ok button now as I say for our first tool path we're going to come up choose the V carve engraving tool path and the start depth of this is going to be 0 but I'm going to come down and create a flat depth fear and the flat depth is going to use one of those document variables so this is going to be the top text in this case so this is going to be the top depth to use a document variable and for it to remain there without me entering the value have to create a curly bracket then I'm going to enter TD and a close curly bracket so now the software will automatically pick up and use that variable instead of me having to enter a value for the tool I want to use a 90-degree V bit but with a small flat on the bottom of it because that'll clear up more nicely around the letters so I'm going to click on the select button I'm going to need to create this tool in this case so we'll put this under engraving tools I think so we'll select that I'm going to create a new tool and I'm going to create an engraving tool in this case because if it's small flat on the bottom now the diameter of this tool is going to be half an inch and you can see if I don't edit the name of the top at the top when I create a new tool and start editing the values it will automatically change the name itself this is a 90 degree V bit which means when we specify an engraving tool that it'll actually have a 45-degree side angle we can see that in the diagram here and the flat diameter on this tool is 0.03 of an inch so sometimes it may not pick up that extra decimal place there Oh points I've edited that manually myself passed steps for this tool I'm gonna set to 0.15 step over and need this to be in the quite small range here so we'll maybe go point oh one five or 50% and the clearance path step over I'm going to set to be 0.15 as well for things like the spindle speed the feeds and the plunge I'm just going to enter values that should be fairly safe and appropriate and we'll just give this an arbitrary tool number of one and need to make sure we choose an appropriate value for the feed rates there so just go ahead and reenter that so inches a minute there everything else is set up in inches now we can hit apply and okay and we've selected that tool there for the flat engraving tool I'm going to select a quarter inch end mill hit apply and okay and in this case I'm going to select a will actually select an offset pattern for this I think so I've got various other parameters I could set here I'm not going to use those but what is important is the vector selector so the way we've set up my affect our layers here again by saving this as a template if I use the vector selector I can automatically recalculate tool paths with different vectors as long as they're on the same layers as I use and choose here so I'm going to go with clothes vectors selected layers only and for this I want to go between the inner border and the top text and I'm going to say associate with tool path so they'll remember it next time I calculate the tool paths and hit close and I should see these vectors selected there so we'll call this V carve top text in this case and go ahead and hit calculate now we may want to change the color we're working with here we'll go with that and see how it looks well maybe we'll change the color of our tool path and use a kind of a bluish color here need to make sure I select both tool paths and choose the same colors there and if we choose the first one and preview it we can see the area that's going to be machined away with our flat cutter and then we can see with the V bit there's a lot of work left to do on this text at the top but if we preview that we can see how that's going to look and that's going to give us this nice beveled edge here on my text by using the V bit I'm able to get in and clear out lots of the small detail that I wouldn't be able to do if I was using a flat cutter on both of these well for both tools in this tool path so if we like the way that looks we can calculate our second V carving tool path this time that's going to leave us with the bottom text showing so we're going to click on the same type of tool path and we're going to be able to use most of the same parameters the key things I'm going to change is going to be the depth of cut and the vector selection for this so my flat depth in this case needs to be a combination of both the top depth plus the bottom depth in order to extend that bevel outwards so what I'm going to enter in here is curly brackets TD close curly brackets plus curly brackets BD curly brackets so this is picking up both of my document variables now so the top depth and the bottom depth in this case because bo both set to point 1 that should give me a total depth of cut of point two all the other parameters can remain the same apart from my vector selection this time I'm going to change that to keep the inner border but we're going to go with the bottom text so those other vectors that we welded together I'm going to associate that with a tool path hit close and we'll call this V carve bottom text and hit calculate so now you can see the tool path is going around as much as it can again with the pocket tool path if we just under that you can see what that's going to cut in this case we can use the solid preview as well if we want and then we can see what the V carving or the V bit is going to do subsequent to that again we might want to change the colors here of these so we can make both of these tool paths whites you can see when you've associated a color with a tool path as you get a little square of color as you can see here next to the tool within the tool path list and now as they're both visible we could click preview visible tool paths and see the result of both of those so now we can see how that's starting to look so there you can see that layered up on each of those now with the toolpath color sometimes it can start to look a little bit odd when we've got a bevel like this so at this point we may just want to go back to material color and perhaps change this for something that's going to be easy for us to see what that looks like so you can see the effect of using the v bit and the pocketing gives us this nice layered text that we can see here now the next tool path I want to create is also a V carving tool path but this is just for this text below the names here so that basically the dates of the wedding or whatever events this is to commemorate and so we're going to come back to the V carving tool path this time we don't want a flat depth and the start depth though again needs to use these document variables remember this is depth here is a combination of top depth plus bottom depth so we can enter that again TD + V D in curly brackets and we can select a different tool in this case so maybe we want to go with a 60-degree tall I'm just going to take the default values for this hit apply and okay and for the vectors in this case we want to deselect both of these and just choose those on the V carve text layer associate with tool path and we'll call this V carve date and hit calculate so there if we preview that we can see that that's cutting into the surface there based on those vectors and starting at that surface depth so that looks good and to finish up the last couple of things last couple of toolpaths if we just closed the toolpath preview there first is to drill some locating holes for the screws so I can enter a cut depth so we don't need to go all the way through for this if we don't want to so maybe we'll just go a quarter of an inch in and we'll choose the quarter inch end mill again we can go with the vector selectors here this time I'm going to select the justa drill holes layer and associate close and we'll call that drill holes and calculate so we preview that we can see those been drilled in there close that again and finally we can come up to the profile tool path going to type in Z equals so we get the cut depth of our material if we want to we could just enter Z and not hit the equals and again this works like the document variables so it should just pick up whatever the depth of material is for my part if I enter Z and leave that as a variable rather than calculating the function by hitting equals going to select quarter inch end mill we'll just use the default settings for this actually maybe we'll just increase the pass depth to quarter of an inch as well and I go on the outside I'm going to add tabs and we'll just enter size of tabs we want there edit those and before I can add those tabs though I need to make sure I've got the vector selected in this case because we're using the vector selector I'll just need to hit close come down and click on selector unselect drill holes select the outer border and associate with tool Pat and close so now the right vector selected and we can come back up to edit tabs and we can go ahead and click on here to add tabs in appropriate places to hold this in place while it's being cut out let's call this tool path profile cut out hit calculate and we can preview that and we can see if we maximize that exactly what that's going to look like so at this stage if we liked the way the preview looked we could go ahead and save the toolpaths and run this on our CNC however the real benefit of the way I've set this part up is if we want to make changes either to this file as is or if we want to make edits and start putting in different names and dates but still being able to use all the tool path that we've set up here first of all let's look if we wanted to make a couple of edits to this design we've got here then we'll save this file as a template and then we'll open it in another session of the software and completely change the text that's in here and show you how easy that will be to do given the way that the parts been set up first of all if I look at this there's a couple of things I would want to change I'd like to move the names down a little bit to create a bit more space at the top and I probably like to bold the text for the date so let's just close the preview tool Pass form if actually we'll just go back in there and reset the preview and then close it click on the icon here to switch to the drawing tab I'm going to switch the drawing tab or the 2d view on and hit F in order to fit this in so the first thing I want to do is just select the vectors here for the names and I'm going to move those vectors relative to their current position and we'll let's try moving them half an inch down from where they are now so I think that looks a little bit more balanced next if I close that I'm going to grab this text here I'm gonna go to the draw text so we can edit it I'm gonna change that to be bold and I'm also going to add an established in there so that we can see this is the start of their wedding so we can hit apply and close and if we like the way that looks we should be able to go back to the tool path tab and just click on the icon here to recalculate all tool paths now we haven't changed any of the layer information or anything else on there so in theory if we go ahead and preview rather than preview the selected tool path sorry about that we'll just reset that and say preview auto paths this should give us a new file based on same set at all paths but with the edited position of those vectors and with that text at the bottom having been set to be bold so that's nice that's one quick edit that we're able to make and recalculate all those tool paths easily now the other thing we could do here is start to change the depths of cut so remember we've set the first depth here as top depth the second depth here is bottom depth now if I reset the preview close this we come up to edit and document variables I could change these variables so perhaps they're both in fact we make the top def point out five and the bottom depth point one and hit OK software tells me there's a bunch of tool paths that use those document variables that now need to be recalculated for hit ok click on the recalculate button and then again we go into the preview and say preview all tool paths I don't know how easy this will be to see but now my first step of cut is only gonna be 0.05 of an inch followed by the bottom depth been point one and then this V carving is still going to have picked up the appropriate depth from those document variables so if we look now we can see there's less definition of the top because that's a half the distance as it is from here down to here so that's the way those document variables work now at this stage I want to save two versions of this file if we just close the preview when I got to file save as and I'm going to save a file called stack text romeo-juliet and hit save so we have a copy of that now what I also want to do is save a version of this that we can use as a template that we could load at any time that we wanted to make a plaque like this and be able to easily change the names in here and very simply recalculate the tool paths so I'm going to go up to file save as and we'll just rewrite over stack to text template and hit save so yes I want to replace that now I don't want the welded text in this template though so what I'm going to do is come back over to the tool path sorry the drawing tab click on the 2d view here we'll make a couple of edits let's come down to the layers tab and what I want to do is just switch off all the layers for a moment I'm going to switch on the bottom text layer I'm going to keep that layer but I'm going to delete the text that's on it I'm going to do the same with the top text layer switch that on and delete it now if I switch on the two names layer if you remember we moved the text down afterward edit it edited it so in order to retain that I'm going to select both of these and move these sorry that sets eyes will click on move relative to its current position negative half an inch and then the other edit we made is with the V carve text we made that bold and that's actually picked that up now because we edited that and not the welded version so if we switch these back on we've got all our design we've got our last name and first name text to remember that allows me to go in and change those now if I want that is the versions of those texts before they've been welded together and if we just save over our template file in theory what we've got here now is going to be very easy for us to open and make changes to so this stage I'm just going to so an exit this copy of V car Pro what I want to do is show you how we could take that template file and make it read only if we wanted to and that would ensure that we couldn't overwrite it we'd always be prompted to give it the file a new name if we try to save over it and that would effectively save that as it's that template file without us accidentally making edits to it and changing it so let's go to a different area of my Windows desktop here what I'm going to do is open a copy of Windows Explorer so we can access the files and folders on our PC a nice shortcut way of doing this is to press the key down on your keyboard which has a windows logo on it if you have one of those and then the e key at the same time to open Explorer now I'm going to navigate to the location where I'll save that file so you need to remember where you put the file on your particular PC and then to change this so that I can't accidentally overwrite it I need to make it so that it's read-only I'm going to right mouse click over the file that I want to do that to go down to properties and check the box here so it says read-only and hit apply and ok now I'll be able to open that with the software but if I try and overwrite that file the software will prompt me to give it a different name because it'll say it's read-only and that ensures that I won't accidentally change that template file very very useful thing to do if you have the type of products where you want to save a sort of basic template but be able to make edits to it without accidentally changing it now another useful Windows technique that we can look at while we're here is how to change the number of recently opened files that are available to you from a particular program you'll know that within the vectric software it'll display the most for recently opened files in a list when you first open it sometimes we get asked about having a longer list we don't really have the space in the interface for this because we have to accommodate many different resolutions but what you can do is change this for Windows and how we do this is if we create a program on our taskbar then we're able to edit what's called the jump list so here I've got my vCard pro icon if I don't have an icon for this on the taskbar I can click and drag this down and I've got the option there to pin to taskbar you also enabled to access that by right mouse clicking on the icon as well and you can see that just made a copy from where I can start the program now if a right mouse click on this then I get this recent list and at the moment this is displaying the 10 most recently opened files if I want to make this list even longer then what I can do is just right mouse click anywhere on the taskbar where I don't have an icon so this is down the bottom of the screen here for right mouse click there and go to properties and let's just minimize that window there so within the properties here I'd go to start menu click on customize and there at the bottom it's got Start menu size number of recent programs to display a number of recent items to display in jump lists and so if I want to I can increase these will go with quite large numbers in this case here okay apply and ok and now if I right mouse click on this you can see I get a list of the last 20 if there's 20 items to fill it so just a nice way there that you can easily access a lot of recently open files without being limited to just accessing the four that are shown to you within the software interface itself all I would need to do is click on any of these and they will open automatically within the program so we've had a brief interlude there to look at how we can make our templated file read-only so we don't overwrite it accidentally and also quickly looked at the editing of jump lists there let's restart the car Pro again and come back to our stacked text template example and show you how we can use the file we've set up to edit the text and very easily then recreate the toolpath because of the way we've set out the layers and the way we've used those document variables so I'll click on the icon from the recently opened files here to open the stack text template file now just to demonstrate what the read-only has done if I got to file and save it tells me there that it failed to delete the original file access is denied and that's perfect that's just showing me I can't overwrite that file now I can go to file save as and I can give this a different name so in this case I'm going to call it stack text template and we'll add the names of the people that we're going to change here and we'll call this mark Cleo and hit save so we've got a different version of this now we want to change the text on this to reflect the information that we want for the new plaque that we're going to make so to do this we can come up and we can click here come down to last name text in the layer manager and say select layer vectors hit close and now we could come over and click with that selected and change that to be the surname of our new couple so I'm going to type in Anthony there and that will fill the same space next if we close that I could come into here and we could go for the first name text and select that and we could click and we could change that so we'll put mark and Cleopatra hit apply and close and then finally we could select the text here for the date we can just click to edit that and we'll put something more appropriate so some Roman numerals maybe a space and a Roman month and a Roman year obviously this could be any information you want this is really just as an example for fun here hit close most important thing is these remain on their original layers now the next thing we need to do though is obviously weld together these different parts of text so that we get the correct versions of those vectors that we're going to be able to machine around so if you remember how we did that we took the first names and we right mouse click copy to layer and we put those on the top text layer we took the last name right mouse click copy to layer and put that on the bottom text layer so first names top text layer last name bottom text layer switch off the two name text layers here and we're going to select the top text layer there and what we want to do is weld these together again so this is where we've got the overlapping areas from the script font that you can see between the letters there and we just want to weld those together so let's select this zoom to fit then we're going to click on the icon to convert the object to curves we're going to deselect the inner islands of any of these letters to make sure they don't disappear when we weld them and now with those selected we can click on the icon to weld and then we can reselect all of this and group it together so that's the top text edited now we want to right mouse click and take a copy of that onto the bottom text layer if we switch off the top text layer switch on the bottom text layer select it to make sure it's current so now we've got one group that we've just created there what we need to do for the Antony text in this case or the last name is select that convert that to curves and then immediately click on the group selected objects icon they have to be converted to curves and grouped before I can select both of these and then click on the weld selected again as soon as we've done that while they still selected click on group otherwise I'm going to end up with a lot of separate vectors so you can see how that could become a fairly quick process now the only things left for me to do before I can calculate my toolpaths is to switch on the top text layer so make sure all the layers are on that have vectors on that I'm going to need to machine if I don't do that then they won't get machined the vector selector will only pick vectors that are on layers that are currently switched on next I might want to check under edit and document document variables my depth here so maybe we'll set this one back to point 1 again hit OK software tells me I need to recalculate a whole bunch of tool paths so I need to recalculate everything because we've edited this now we could tile the windows come over to the tool path tab and I should just be able to hit recalculate all tool paths and the software should look at the vector selector for each tool path pick up the new sets of vectors that we've entered in here and put onto the appropriate layers and calculate the tool path accordingly so if we click now on the preview and say preview all tool paths we should get a new plaque with different names and a different date but still with more or less and what we know to be a safe and working set of tool paths assuming you've tweaked these to be correct for your particular setup so to finish off let's save this so file save overwrite the one that we saved separately there from our template and we've pretty much completed this example we've looked at some interesting things in here though first of all we went through quite a detailed setup of our original part to create the template to do that we were very diligent about our use of layers and how we organize them and named them we created specific layers for data that we didn't want to actually tall paths so that was the first name and last name in this case because we needed to do subsequent operations on it to weld it together that would have made it very difficult to edit eventually once we got a part that we like the look of we were able to save both are something we could cut at the state where it was saying Romeo and Juliet but also then to kind of clean that off a bit and save that as a template file we went out into Windows we set that template file to be read-only to ensure that if we use it in future we can't accidentally overwrite it and like you saw me do here then we can use that template though to open create a separate version of it and very quickly and easily edit the data that's in it and use the same set of tool Pat's again and recalculate them very quickly based on having used that vector selector when we did our tool path setup and that concludes this example

Channel: Vectric Ltd

Views: 40,785

Keywords: vectric, cnc, tips and tricks, Vectric Aspire, Vectric Vcarve pro, Vectric Vcarve Desktop, Vcarve pro, vcarve desktop, aspire, Stacked text, stacking text

Id: k7jemFBP1RA

Length: 47min 53sec (2873 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2016