Hey y'all.
Welcome to part 5 of my series on the Vectric software titles for the absolute beginner.
First of all, I am in no way endorsed nor sponsored by Vectric Ltd, or any other software title or company, at all.
I'm doing this series to help the person who has never done anything like this before...
...get into the CAD/CAM software, and be able to create and finish a project in the CAD/CAM software.
Today we're going to get into one of the more popular features within the Vectric titles...
...and everything I'm going to show you today works equally in Cut2D, VCarve, and Aspire, by Vectric Ltd...
One of the more popular features is the ability to import vectors drawn up in another CAD program...
...into VCarve, for example.
Today we're going to focus on the DXF file.
Let's take a step back here for those who don't know what a DXF file is...
I'll just throw the Wikipedia page up here...
The DXF file was made by AutoDesk in the early 80s for AutoCAD.
DXF stands for Drawing Exchange Format or Drawing Interchange Format...
...and it was simply a file that could be opened either in AutoCAD or any of the other CAD programs available at the time.
It was a quick way for folks to exchange drawings.
It broke everything down to its basic information...
...so that you could import the drawing without all of the proprietary information...
...needed by AutoCAD or something like TurboCAD.
So it was a way for people working on different software platforms to exchange those drawings.
For a while it became the standard way for CNCers to exchange drawings.
So if you were working in VCarve and somebody was using BobCAD, for example...
...you could export a DXF file of your drawing and that person...
...could import those vectors into their program.
It's still used today, but not as much as it was a few years back.
There are other ways and other formats that are being used now.
The main thing to remember about the DXF file is the overwhelming majority of them are 2D vector drawings.
Let's go ahead and get into one such vector drawing just to show you what I'm talking about.
We'll start by creating a new file...
...and I'm going to accept whatever is in here.
In this case it happens to be a 12 inch width in X, a 12 inch height in Y...
...and a 3/4 inch thickness. It's a single sided project.
Again, my Z zero is set to the material surface...
...and for layout purposes I'm going to run my X Y datum at the center of the material.
We'll go ahead and click OK.
To import the vectors from a DXF file...
...as usual for a windows-based program, there are several ways of doing it.
Probably the easiest of them will be to...
...come up to the File menu...
...come down to Import...
...and click Import Vectors.
We'll click on that and we'll come down here into this folder I've created for this episode...
...and we have 3 DXF files here.
I'm going to select this one...
...and open it...
...and we don't see anything here.
This is something that's pretty common when importing DXF files...
...so let me roll my scroll wheel back to zoom out...
...and there are our vectors over there.
This is one of those things built into the DXF file format.
Here is my X zero, Y zero point.
This is the drawing origin.
When the CAD file was drawn...
...this set of vectors were drawn over here in relation to the drawing origin.
So the drawing is placed over here.
Now I want to center it on my material.
So we see it's already pink. It's already selected when we import it.
I'll come over here under my Transform Objects menu...
...and click Align Selected Objects.
Align Selected Objects is broken down into a couple of different areas, here.
I want to align the center of these vectors to the center of the material.
I want to align them horizontally as well as vertically...
...so we have this center icon...
...when I click that icon it moves the center of those vectors to the center of my material.
Now I can close that.
Now I need to resize them.
So I'll come back over here under Transform Objects...
...to Set Selected Object Size...
...click on this and we can see that it's a 40 inch diameter set of vectors.
I'll make sure I have Link X Y checked...
I'll come up here into the width in X...
...and I want to make this a 10 inch diameter.
So we'll just type 10.
We see the height in Y also changes because of this checkmark...
We'll click Apply...
...then close.
Now I can click off to deselect those vectors.
One of the things that CAD programs tend to do...
...is they break vectors up into their separate elements...
So when I select this outside circle...
...and I see the entire thing light up in the pink dashes...
...I can see right now that this is a closed vector.
This is a closed vector that we can use right now in VCarve.
Meaning, this is all one vector that has a start point, and an end point, and it's the same point.
Let me click on this inside circle and we see it's the same
This is a closed vector.
Then we go to the outside of the number eight...
...and each individual circle.
These are all closed vectors.
So we can just get to work with these.
Just to make absolutely certain that I have no open vectors in this drawing...
I'll come out here, away from any of these vectors...
...right-click...
...come up here to Selection...
...then come over here to Select All Open Vectors.
I'll left click that...
No Open Vectors In Design.
It's been my experience with CAD files that this is not a normal condition.
Let me illustrate that by coming down here and opening a new session of VCarve.
We'll create a new file...
...and I'm going to use the same measurements here.
I'm not going to change anything.
I'll import another set of vectors...
...so I'll come up here to file... Import... Import Vectors...
...and we'll go to this one here...
...select that drawing...
...and click Open...
That one imported directly to the center of my material...
...so that's fine.
Let me click off to deselect...
...and I'll just right-click...
...Selection...
...Select All Open Vectors.
And everything except these two circles are selected.
So that tells me that each one of these vectors here...
Well... now... those are connected...
...and these are not...
...so we have three open vectors here.
These are all open vectors...
...meaning that there are very few things we can do with these vectors without joining them first.
This is usually how vectors import from a DXF file...
The vectors are usually not joined because the CAD software sees each vector as a separate entity.
The fact that some of these are joined is a little bit unusual.
But it does happen on occasion.
So what we'll need to do before we can use this particular file...
...is we'll have to join these vectors.
I'll do that by selecting them...
...again starting up here above the vectors...
...and draw that box there to select all of these vectors...
...then come over here under Edit Objects...
...to this icon right here - Join Open Vectors.
Click that...
...and we can see up here that of my selected vectors, I have 3 open vectors.
After I join them, I'll have 1 closed vector, and that's what I need to do.
Up here is the tolerance.
The factory default from Vectric is .0004 inches.
Meaning that the end points of the vectors have to be closer together...
...than .0004 inches to be joined by this process.
You can adjust tolerance this if you'd like, I haven't found a need to.
You can adjust it so that the vectors can be farther apart or closer together before they'll join.
I haven't found a need to make that change, so I run with the factory default.
So with all my vectors selected I can just click Join...
...and now if I come over here and select it...
...it's all one closed vector.
and I'll do the same over here.
I have 2 open vectors this time...
...and after joining I have one closed vector.
Now these vectors can be used to cut out these corner clamps.
Something to watch out for is the fact that there are 3D DXF files out there.
I'll show you what I mean by coming down here to this folder and selecting this DXF file.
Right off the bat, if we look over here, we can see the file size on this is 3.17 megabytes .
Now if you compare it to these other DXF files, this one's only 16.5 kilobytes...
...and this one even less...
6 and not quite three quarters of a kilobyte.
So compared to these two, this file is huge.
That's one of the first telltale signs that this may be a three-dimensional DXF file.
Now in handling three-dimensional DXF files, there are a couple of ways of going about it.
The first way is to import it into VCarve as a 3D file...
...NOT as a vector drawing.
Here I have that DXF file imported into VCarve, and it's extremely faint here...
...in the 2D view...
...but if I switch over to the 3D view there we can see this file.
It is a 3D file.
There is a thickness.
There is relief to this file.
Now let me go ahead and just import it into VCarve Pro...
...as we would a standard DXF file.
I'll create a new file and again accept everything as it is...
...then attempt to import this as a standard vector drawing.
You'll see that, number one, it takes a long time for it to load.
This is a large file.
It's still working...
...still loading...
Okay, here we are finally...
I'm going to zoom in, here...
This is what gets imported if I attempt to import a 3D file...
...as a standard DXF vector file.
Not only is VCarve completely confused by the sheer number of faces and surfaces here...
...but if you look closely, each segment of this perimeter rectangle...
is a separate vector in and of itself.
Here we get into vector confusion, because I've selected a vector down here...
...and you can see that it's pink...
...but there's still black behind it.
So am I selecting the top surface?
The bottom surface?
The center geometry?
We don't know.
So this would require a ton of cleanup to be able to...
...import into VCarve as a standard vector file.
Again one way we could handle this would be to import it as a 3D file...
...and then cut it as a 3d file...
But that's outside of the scope of this video, so I'm not going to show you how to do that this time.
That's for another video at another time.
So instead of going any further with this file...
...we'll go ahead and save this for a later date.
We'll get back to our other two files...
We'll start with the 8-ball first.
Because all of these vectors are closed vectors...
...we're ready to work with these just like any other vectors that we may have created ourselves.
So let's go ahead and play a little bit.
What I'll do is I'll select these two vectors by drawing a box from right to left...
And I want to create a pocket in between these two vectors.
So we'll switch over to the toolpaths tab...
...and I'll come up here to the pocket toolpath.
For this vector, I'd like to cut this into the surface of the material...
...then the numeral 8 into the surface of the material.
So let's use a cut depth of about 1/16 of an inch...
...so that's .0625...
It's a pretty large area, so I'll go ahead and use a 1/4 inch end mill...
Because we're only cutting 1/16 inch deep, it'll do this in one pass...
I don't need to use a larger area clearance tool.
Because it's a circular pattern, I will go ahead and use the Offset method to clear the pocket...
...rather than using Raster...
...which would mean the bit would come over here and move back and forth, from side to side...
it's just easier on the tool to use Offset for this cut.
I'm not gonna ramp any plunge moves...
I will go ahead and just call this...
...ball pocket...
...and we'll calculate that toolpath.
Here in my preview window...
...I'm going select toolpath color...
...Calvados? I don't know where that came from... let's change it back to maple...
...and I'll set my toolpath color to black because after all an 8 ball is black.
Let's preview that selected toolpath.
Okay now to change my view here in the 3d view...
...all I'm doing right now is I'm clicking and holding the left mouse button...
...and I can move my mouse up or down, and it's rocking this back and forth.
Then I can come over here and by moving my scroll wheel forward, I'm zooming in...
...but you'll notice that in the 3D view, it's different from the 2D view.
It's not proportional like the 2D view is.
No matter where I place my cursor, it zooms in and out from the center.
So I have to zoom in, then move my view.
To move my view after I've zoomed in I press down on the scroll wheel.
Then I can move my 3D view around.
Then let go of the scroll wheel, zoom in or zoom out...
So it's a little bit different from the 2D view.
I had a question about that last week and forgot that I hadn't gone over that.
So zoom in with the scroll wheel, press down on the scroll wheel and move the mouse...
...to move within your 3D view.
Go back up here and take a straight Z shot and fill the screen.
I will close the preview...
...come back over here to the 2D view...
...and I'm going to select these three vectors...
...again by drawing a box around them...
...then come back up and do another pocket.
I'm going to use the same cut depth...
...but this time I think the quarter inch bit may be too big to fit in between the outside of the eight...
...and the inside circles here, so I'll drop that down to a 1/8 inch end mill.
Again it'll clear that in one pass, again it'll do an offset cut...
And I'll name this the Number 8 Pocket.
I'll calculate the toolpath...
Again, up here, I'll change my toolpath color to black...
...and we'll preview that toolpath...
...and there we go.
Now I have this cool little 8-ball that I can cut out hang up on the wall...
...using those vectors that we imported from a DXF file.
With the 8-ball cut out, I'm going to call this the end of this video.
Yeah we still have this other file over here that we could demonstrate...
...but it's basically the same thing as our 8 ball, just using profile toolpath instead of the pocket toolpath.
The point is that the vectors that we imported from a DXF file...
...can be used just the same as any vectors we create ourselves.
So that's it.
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