Vectric - Super Tips For The Beginner, Vcarve, Aspire & Cut2D - Vectric Tutorial

IDC woodcraft.com hello my CNC brother or sister I'm Garrett with IDC Woodcraft welcome to this vectric related video where we're going to talk about a very common problem that I see brand new beginners who are just working with the vectric software they have this problem all the time and they don't really understand because they don't know the software and it's just part of the learning curve but in this video you're going to learn exactly this little problem that as a beginner you'll almost certainly run into and how to get around it really quickly I got an email from our CNC brother Dylan who is simply trying to cut out a chicutery board he wants to cut out the board and cut out the hole and he can't get the software to cut out the board and he doesn't understand why there are two things that are happening on this that because Dylan is brand new isn't skilled enough to see but we all go through that and you are probably going to go through this too so we're going to dive into the software we're going to look at the error that he's getting and I'm going to show you exactly how to fix it so when you run into it you will be able to solve it and move right on so let's get into the software here's the email I got from Dylan it says Hey Garrett if you don't mind I'm having an issue with my first project trying to do just a simple profile cut for Security Board I was able to get the hole and the handle to work but not the actual profile cut of the board it gave me an error message and he sent a photo and he asked me or what are the thoughts on this and here is the error that he got it says error no tool path generated for current parameters check that tool can fit into selected vectors at Machining depth so we're going to go into the project that Dylan had which is this right here so this is Dylan's project it's a simple basic charcuterie board it has a outer profile and it has a hole in it on the handle so we're gonna go just take a look at Dylan's project to where he's gotten it to and we're going to dissect it and solve this very common problem that many many beginners have and you will you'll be able to overcome this by the time you've done this video so we're going to go take a look at the tool path by selecting this blue arrow button in the upper left hand corner and that is going to switch us over to the tool path and then we can see that Dylan has made two tool paths so I'm going to take a look at the first one by well before we take a look at the tool paths let's just see how this generates out so what we're going to do is we're going to have the software actually cut it out so we can see what it looks like at the very bottom of all the icons the bottom row all the way to the left when you hover over that icon it says preview tool paths select that and then suddenly this board appears and we can see something right away in this and what I see is there is no tool path generated for the outside of the charcuterie board which it should be seen here because when we look down at the lower right corner where it says profile one and profile two and notice that the two boxes are checked that means that we should actually be able to see where the router bit is going and what we only see are these blue circles we actually see a red line in here too if I turn up you see a red line a green line some cyan lines and some dark blue lines the red line is the rapid move of the machine so the rapid move of the machine will be at the lower left corner way way over there and then it's going to wrap it along this line up over the hole and then it's going to let's move this a little bit closer it's going to plunge down in it's going to cut the circle there then plunge again cut that Circle plunge again cut the third circle and plunge again and then you see it's acting a little weird there that's because he has something called tabs now we'll take a look at that as we move along but what's missing are the blue lines that are going around the entire profile so we're just going to Simply click the one that says preview all tool paths and what we have is a simple hole and we don't have the rest of the project so we are going to take a look at his 2D image now what I'm going to do is go back into profile one simply hover over profile one and double click it when we do that it opens that tool path back up and now we're going to take a look at the 2D drawing and we're going to look at it alongside the 3D drawing the way we do that is by splitting our screens in the upper right of the screen or of your project you'll see several icons we want to select the very last icon to the right where it says array arrange views vertically as non-overlapping Windows so we're going to click that and now we can see both the 3D View and the 2D view now we are going to take a look at this 2D view a little bit closer so I'm going to maximize this 2D window by selecting the little square right over the window we select that and that expands that window so the first few things that I see immediately are the that this is grouped so what grouping means is the outside of The Chicory board and the circle or the hole are both part of a group meaning they are tied together they are married together they're bonded together you can't break them apart and do independent things with them as it stands right now and the way I can tell or the way you can tell is by the color of the line and that the type of line it is a solid purple line and that means it is a grouped item and everything that is selected in it is grouped I'm going to select right here I'm just simply going to click once with my left Mouse button to deselect and now you notice everything went uh went to a black line now nothing is selected if I come over and select the circle it is now purple but so is The Chicory board itself and that tells me that everything is grouped now the other thing that we have in here are these little yellow boxes with a t in them those are tabs and tabs are little pieces of wood that are left over or the router bit will come up and over and leave a little piece of material left so that the plug for the hole will remain intact and you would cut it out later same with around the charcuterie board there will be little tabs from the outside piece here that connect it to the charcuterie board after you cut it out but that's another issue another item it's not an issue it's just what's there we need to solve this problem now I can almost see this problem right now if we are looking at The Chicory board I noticed something and you will notice something if you pay attention as we come in here we see a little bit of a doubling over of the line this may or may not cause an issue but it happens more often than we wanted to so we have to fix that and I'm going to bet that that is where the problem is at so first thing I'm going to do is exit this tool path so we're going to come over the tool path select the close button because I don't want to change it and then come up to the upper right where that little blue arrow is and I'm going to click the blue arrow that so we can come back over to the drawing area so I'm going to click that now well we're in the drawing area the first thing we need to do is ungroup these so that I can work with this little area right here right now I cannot do any design modifications or changes or figure out what's going on here until we ungroup this project so before we do that I want you to understand that when you are working with projects there are selections throughout the design areas that when you do something you have the option to bring things in as a group or not as a group and I always prefer to do it not as a group I'm not going to cover that here but you will most often see it well I'll show you quickly you'll most often see it in this here when you were trying to trace over an image so we have this little icon that when you hover over it says trace bitmap or trace a picture and we select that and when we come down to the bottom there is a there will be a little check box here and that check box if it's highlighted and you move forward will bring your project in as a group so just so you know uh you want to watch for that type of check box so I am going to close this and we're going to come back in and select this item and we need to now ungroup it and the way you do that is by selecting your grouped objects which is selected right now and we know it's selected and we know it's grouped because the shakiri board has a solid purple line and when we click it the circle also pops up with a solid purple line so anywhere in the project we do not have to hover our cursor over the line just anywhere while the item is selected click the right Mouse button I'm going to stop this video for just a second because I have seen this so many times from people who are getting into this that it warrants this little Interruption of this video and that is those people who do not use a mouse and are always using the little uh the touchpad on their computer and a little side scroll bars on the window and you are working yourself so hard it's ridic Oculus design software is built for a mouse not for the keyboard and all those little things yes you have all the little tools there but you will find yourself working four to five times harder when you don't use a mouse get a mouse if you don't have one I would say stop this video right now go down to the description section I have a link for this particular Mouse which is a Logitech which I like a ton off Amazon go get it don't even watch the rest of this video until you get the mouse because you really are hurting yourself when it comes to design so please get a mouse and then you'll find your whole design world will be so much easier so much more fluid all right I had to stop because I've seen it so much from people get a mouse go down the description click that link buy it right now and then resume this video let's get back to this design so we're going to click the right Mouse button and a menu will pop up and down in the middle it says ungroup objects and then you have two selections that pop up the first one is ungroup back to original object layers and the second one says ungroup to group Slayer so I'm not going to discuss this first one we just want to ungroup to the groups layer you will use this first when a selection when you get a little bit more experienced and you'll understand how to use it then we're simply going to ungroup it to the group's layer and click and now you notice that everything is a dashed line and that is telling me all the vectors are independent Now by Vector every line that is drawn is called a vector and we have two types of vectors we have an open vector and a closed vector I'm going to click right here to deselect everything and then I'm going to come over and hover over the circle and click that now you notice this time the circle comes in with a dashed line and it turns purple which means it's selected but the charcuterie board itself did not that means they are now independent vectors which is what we want we are going to work with the security board so we don't need this selected for the hole so we're going to click right here to deselect the circle and then we're going to click on the security board now this is where we need to take a look at items now you notice in this image right now there's a little bit of a strange anomaly in the dashed line and that's telling me that there is an issue going on there you will see that and you will get used to seeing this sometimes these things just crop up and we I don't even know why they happen from time to time so we zoom into it and we have this double line so what we're going to do is take a look at the nodes nodes are the elements that indicate transition points now what I mean by a transition point we have a straight line right up here and then it transitions into an arc or a curve and so there has to be a node that tells the software that is going to make that transition so while the Vector of the security board is selected we're going to press the letter N on the keyboard n for Nancy and you notice all these little black dots pop up now you see in this straight line there is a black dot that is a node and then it goes into an arc this little white square with the line coming off it to the black dot that is how you can adjust how these lines are working we're not going to get into that too much but I'll just show you real quick I'm going to hover over it you notice that my arrow turns into a square target when it's in a square target that means I can grab that flag or tab I'm not sure what they call it I'm going to click my left Mouse button and hold and now I have grabbed that handle it's called a handle that's it and now you can see I can move that handle around and I'm changing the line and that's what that is for so now I let it go now it's really weird to undo that press the control button down and hold it and then press Z and that undoes that move okay so let's take a look at this little area where we have this crossing over so the crossover the line comes up like that and there's a node there and then there's another line that's coming over in a slight Arc like that so we're going to grab one of these nodes and just move it to see what's going on so I'm going to hover directly over that node I get the square target now hold the left Mouse button down and drag it and just move it out of the way and there is the problem what we have why this is not working is because this is an open Vector as opposed to a closed Vector when vectric is trying to do a profile cut and by profile we're cutting around the outside profile of the charcuterie board it is looking for something called a closed Vector here is the difference between a closed vector and an open vector I'm going to grab a line and simply draw a line like that and then I'll escape to get out of that so the line has a start point right here and you follow along it and it has an end point there's no two ways about it there's a start point and an end point now if I draw a rectangle I'm doing this with a line again and it won't even be a rectangle be an odd shape now even though we started drawing this right here if we just Trace along there technically is no end point to start and end we have a start Point here we have an end point here but there's not a start and end point here we can start anywhere on a line and we'll just keep going around the line so that's the difference between an open and closed Vector when we're doing a profile oops I hit a button on my keyboard so let me just go back and hit this delete button and delete there we go okay so this is where the problems coming in vectric is not seeing the outside line as a profile cut because of this issue right here so we need to close this Vector so the way we do that is we're going to select a vector so I just simply started from the right of the project held my left Mouse button down and just crossed over so that little box is touching that line and then let go of the mouse button and it selected that Vector then we will press the end button for node again so the nodes come up and I'm simply going to drag that node down to here the way I did that was again hover over the node we'll come back up here the node is up there hover over it my my cursor turns into a Target which means I can now grab that node hold my left Mouse button down and just simply drag it right there and now it's kind of in line with this node right there and this is where we're going to close this Vector so first of all we're going to turn node off and the way we do that is by pressing the node button or the escape button I'm going to press the node button or n for Nancy and that turns node off and our line is currently selected so we're going to come over to edit objects over here and then down in the bottom row are four icons and it's the two middle icons that we are going to pay attention to these two will allow you to close this vector or turn it into a a never ending line going around in the shape of a chicory board we have two options we can either do it with a straight line which is this node or we can do it with a curved line since this is pretty much a straight line at this point we're simply going to do the straight line but because it's such a small area it does not matter very much so now I want you to look at the line that we have and I'm going to click the straight line join vectors with a straight line button right now and you see that on that line we have now created a line right there that joined that Vector that the line joined between the two notes I'm going to hit n again and this is the line that was just added and you see it's a little crooked here and in such a small item it doesn't really matter such a small area of the cut it doesn't really matter you're not really going to see it but we want this to be cleaned up a little bit so you're learning about nodes at the same time and we're going to clean this up by hovering over the green node now the green node indicates the start point of the cut that is where the router bit is going to come in to start cutting the Shakura so the green node is effectively a black node but it's just indicating where the cut is going to start at we're going to hover over the green node and hit the letter d on the keyboard and when I did that the green node disappeared from here and it's now moved up to here so now we have a new start point we have now we now have a closed Vector you can continue to straighten this up as you want now we'll just go ahead and get rid of this node as well so we're going to hover over that one and hit D just to clean it up there we go and so everything's starting to look pretty good now it's time to go over to fix these tool paths I'm going to hit the letter N to turn off node and then we're going to come up to the little blue arrow in the upper left up yeah upper left select that and go over to Tool path now we're going to go back into profile one before I do that this can all be done in one tool path so we don't need two tool paths I'm going to select profile 2. hover over it hit the right button on my mouse to bring up this menu and down at the bottom it says delete I'm going to hover over that a new menu will open up but it says delete this I'm going to select that and it will delete profile too so now we only have one tool path profile one so we're going to double click into that and now you notice that nothing is selected and that is because we have altered these lines based on the tool path when we first had this tool path it was looking at everything as a group we ungrouped it which altered the nature of the lines and so therefore the tool path can no longer recognize what it was what was originally selected so we have to reselect and what I'm going to do is simply over the handle here I'm going to hover to the upper right hold the left Mouse button down and create a box that touches both lines and that will select them both now you notice we have the tabs here the little yellow boxes but they're no longer around here and that is because we altered this line this is no longer what it was because we joined that so it's completely different Vector does not know where to put the tabs at that Dylan had put it in hey I wanted to stop for a second and just to ask you if you feel like you're getting something out of this video some little tips and tricks that you might not have known as a vectric beginner can you do me a favor and just below this video there's a little Thumbs Up Button can you hit that that's called a like and maybe if you feel like you want to get some more stuff out of this vectric stuff and want to learn this stuff really fast then you probably want to subscribe to this channel because I teach everything at this kind of level and a lot of project work basically I do a lot of little projects for you easy projects that start you from the very beginning all the way through the design and how to set it up on your CNC router and I teach you how to run it all the way out on your CNC router so you might want to subscribe to the channel as well and I would love to see a comment down below of things that you might want to see or what you've gained out of this video also down in the description are a lot of links number one is for the CNC insiders that's an email list that I have that if you want to get free free design files and some discounts to things that I've been able to get that I don't make available on the public YouTube channel you'll want to get on the CNC insiders list and the link to sign up for that is down below also if you're interested in a CNC business CNC entrepreneurs Facebook group is a group of 25 000 CNC creators who are starting businesses are all the way up to who have become very successful so you can get a lot of tips and tricks in there as to how to start a CNC business so like the video button down below that little thumbs up thing and subscribe if you want to learn this stuff all the way from designing to CNC routers to how to start a CNC business and of course check all the links down the description because there's lots of little things that will help you out and remember get a mouse please please please get a mouse your life will be so much easier so we now have these items selected and we're just going to fix up these tabs real quick I'm going to show you add you add a little bit uh uh of uh education here for you how do we get the tabs back in here down in this section of the tool path setup there's a little check box that says add tabs to Tool path and that box is checked if I uncheck that box the tabs on the circle will go away so I uncheck that and they are now gone and that's because we're now telling the software we don't want them if we check it again the tabs that were added are there but we want to add our tabs to the shakuturi board itself so we're going to go down to add tabs select that and then up top it says uh the the number of tabs that we want and it says four and we simply click the add tabs button and now when you look at the whole project there are four tabs on the outside of the charcuterie board if you want your tabs to be in different places it's very easy number one you can hover your little plus sign over the tab hold your left Mouse button down and drag that tab to the new place that you want if you want to add a tab you simply hover over the line where you want the tab and click once with your left Mouse button and that tab has been added if you want to remove a tab you hover over this the tab and click your left Mouse button again and it goes away so I can delete that tab I can add it I can delete it I can add it I can add a whole bunch of tabs all along this project so we're gonna click them again because I don't want them and we'll move that on over there and then we're going to come over and close the tabs menu now all we have to do is run the project I'm going to come down one thing you want to do is always name your tool path so we're going to name this tool path board and hole and then we want to add in the router bit that we are using in this case he's using a one quarter inch End Mill so we're going to type in 1 4 em and we will calculate and you notice now that the name has taken in the tool path it's no longer profile one it is board and hole one four em but the thing I want you to notice now is we now have let's reset that preview we now have blue lines everywhere we now know that the software is going to cut out the board and cut the hole so all we have to do now is preview this okay so let's just explain this real quick we got the red line I think I explained this before but I forget if I did or not with the red line that's where the the start point of the project is over to the lower left corner and it's going to wrap it over to here and the the tool is going to move down into the material and the H blue line is a cut so you can see it is going to cut one two three four times on the hole and one two three four times on the security board now you notice those funny little cuts are no longer at the bottom of the hole like they were before and that's because vectric cannot add the tabs because they are too wide and too close together and it will not work so Vector does not calculate in the tabs but you notice right here we have a little lift up on the tool path this is where the tabs are going to be created so we have one over here one here and then we've got them over in the other part of the board so let's take a look and see what we have so we're going to come over and preview all tool paths select that and there is our charcuterie board we're gonna just double click on the plug in the hole and that will make that go away now if we double click on the scrap material over here it will not go away we get an alert because we are attached by the tabs and so that's why we can't delete that scrap but now you can see that we have this fixed so just a quick reiteration of where the problem was I'm going to switch over to the 2D tool path and our problem was that little overlap and you can notice it just by seeing a little aberration or whatever you want to call it in the dashed lines when you see that you want to scroll in close to the project and take a look and see what's going on well now we've solved Dylan's problem with the circulatory board and for you as a CNC beginner using vectric in your early stages of learning it you have learned quite a few things about grouping vectors being open nodes how to join vectors we talked about tabs and group what how to look for some of these different things and how to spot them and how to fix them so please remember to check the description down below join CNC insiders the CNC entrepreneurs get yourself a mouse please like the video and if you want more of the stuff subscribe to this channel because you're going to learn so much stuff see the description have a great day better tomorrow and happy CNC

Channel: IDC Woodcraft

Views: 13,511

Keywords: vectric tutorial, cnc for beginners, cnc router, Garrett Fromme, vectrix, idc woodcraft, idcwoodcraft

Id: 4Ot0ZFqVO9g

Length: 30min 24sec (1824 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022