Easily Make Toolpaths after Nesting Objects
How to use layers and toolpath templates to easily create toolpaths after nesting objects in multiple sheets. This lesson applies to Vectric VCarve Pro, Aspire, and Cut2D Pro but some aspects can be used in the desktop versions as well.
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Video Transcript:
In my last quick tip lesson, we looked at how to nest objects into odd shapes, and in the comments, Victor had a great question. He said, are you able to nest an object with multiple copies that you already have the toolpaths set for? And I told him there is a way, and I told him I would make a video for it.
So in this lesson, we're gonna look at exactly how to do that. So for this example, we're gonna be using this simple cabinet side. And as you could see, it has the profile shape, it has some shelf pinholes, and it has a groove in the back. And it already created a toolpath for all three of those objects.
And if we look at the 3D view, We can take a look at what the preview looks like. So we'll preview all and double click to remove their waste. And now you can see what our final product would look like. So that's our first step, we wanna make sure everything's working the way we want it to. And now we can go ahead and create toolpaths.
So let's go to the 2D view again. And what we can do is we can nest the shape. So we're gonna select all of this and use the nesting tool. But a very important step here is you want to organize the layers before you do this. Otherwise, all of these shapes are gonna be on the same layer and it's gonna be much harder to choose what you want to carve.
So up here in the layer menu, you could see, I already created a few new layers and you could do that just by clicking add new layer. So I made one for the profile, one for the groove in the back, one for the label, and one for the shelf pin holes. And it also made them different colors, which is my personal preference so you can easily tell what layer they are on.
So what we're gonna do is select the objects. So we're gonna right click on this outer shape. We're gonna go to move to layer and we are gonna put it on the profile layer. If you didn't have your layers created already, you can click add new layer down here at the bottom, but we're gonna click profile for the outer shape.
And then we're gonna select all these shelf panels. And right click on those and move those to the shelf pinhole layer, and then select the label here in the middle and right click, move that to the label level. And then we are going to do the back groove there, we're gonna right click and we'll put it on the groove layer.
And now you can see they're all different colors representing those specific layers. Now that's gonna make it much easier when we go to nest these. That's the most important part of this process. So now we're gonna switch over to nesting. We are going to use the nesting tool. We're gonna select all of these shapes and we are gonna set up our settings here.
Now, once again, I'm not gonna go too in depth on this. We're gonna just mostly focus on how to create those toolpaths. So I do wanna rotate my parts, I'm gonna rotate them 90 degrees just to see if that fits better. And I don't wanna mirror anything. I do want to not use the nest boundary, so I'm gonna turn that off.
Now, down here, we can set our number of copies. So if we zoom out, we can kind of get an idea of how many copies we might be able to fit in here. We might be able to fit two side by side. Uh, but I don't think it will. So we might be able to fit three in here so we could try three copies, click apply and click preview.
And there you go, it will rotate those shapes to find the best fitment. And as always, you can play around with the settings and keep clicking preview, and sometimes you'll get a more optimized result, which this here looks much better. And if we did more than three copies, it would spill over into another sheet.
And after this, I will show you an example of how to deal with something like that. So let's just click okay for this. And now we're dealing with three parts and if we go back to our toolpaths, we still have those three toolpaths that I originally created, except they're still in the same location as before. And if we look in the 3D view and reset the preview, you could see they're only for that one cabinet.
And if we just recalculate these toolpaths by right clicking on one of them, going to recalculate and click recalculate all you could see it's giving us an error because the nesting tool deleted those original shapes and created new copies. So now the toolpaths can no longer find the original vectors.
So that's why we're getting this error. We're gonna click, okay. And the way to fix this is to go back into the toolpaths settings. So I'm just going to double click on each one individually. And what you wanna do is go down here where it says vector selection. Right now it's set to manual, that means we would manually have to find each one of those vectors that associate with this toolpath.
But since we separated those into different layers, it is much easier to go to the selector tool and we can filter through our results by what layer they're on. So in this case, we want closed vectors, on the groove layer and you'll see, those are automatically get selected in the background there. And then our last step we wanna associate with the toolpath, that will automatically select those anytime we make changes.
Now click close and then recalculate that, and now you see, we have three grooves this time. So now we just have to do that for the remaining two toolpaths. So go back to the 2D view, double click on the drill toolpath. Go to the vector selection, we want closed vectors. With this one, you can go to only circles and you could filter it by the size of the circle, but in this case, they're all on the same layer anyways.
So we can just check the shelf pin holes, and we wanna associate with toolpath click close and you see, when you do that, it will switch it to automatic selection. That means anytime you place something on that layer, it will automatically be associated with this toolpath when you recalculate it. So I'm gonna click calculate.
Now we got more shelf pin holes there. Now we just need the profile toolpath so we could double click on that, go to the vector selection. We're gonna do close vectors on the profile layer and associate those with the toolpath click close, now click calculate. And there we go, now we have all of our toolpaths going onto all of the new vectors.
Now, if you click preview, you'll see now we get the exact results that we wanted and we could double click on that waste if we wanted to and see our final product. Okay, so that's our first example. The next example I'm gonna show you is gonna be when you have quite a few more parts and they spill over into other sheets.
So as of right now, in version 11, when you create toolpaths in a single sheet, you cannot copy them to another sheet. I hope Vectric adds that in as a feature in newer versions. But as of right now, you cannot do that. So if you have Aspire, VCarve Pro, or Cut2D Pro, you can get around this by doing what's called save as a toolpath template.
So if we check all three of these toolpaths and we click save all visible toolpaths as a template that will save those toolpaths and all of their settings as a template onto your computer. So I'm just gonna save those on the desktop. And I will just say cabinet toolpath template and click save. So now we can use that in additional sheets, or we can use that in new files.
So for example, if I go to this file here, where I have even more parts, so these will be all the parts for a cabinet. I could select all these parts. And you can see currently I have no toolpaths at all. I first want to nest these, so I'm gonna go to the nesting tool and I'm gonna use the same settings, except this time I'm gonna make five copies of all these, so it should make five cabinets total, and I'm gonna click apply and then I'm gonna click preview.
And now it just made five copies of each part, and neatly nested them into four sheets. And you'll see the original sheet is empty and that's okay. So now we need to make toolpaths for all four of those sheets. And if you did this without organizing the layers first, this would be very time consuming. So that's why it's best to organize your layers like I showed you in the last example.
And now we can import that toolpath template that we just created and it'll automatically create all the toolpaths for these four sheets. So we're gonna click a load toolpath template. We're gonna select that cabinet toolpath template we made, click open. And then it's gonna ask you, would you like to apply it to all of the sheets, if you didn't just click no, but in this case we do so click yes.
And now you let it do its magic. And now you'll have three toolpaths for each sheet. Unless for some reason, one of these objects didn't have a toolpath that was needed on that sheet. So for example, if one of these sheets did not have the shelf pin holes, then you wouldn't need a drilling toolpath on that sheet.
Okay, so now this will separate into different sheets. So right now we are on sheet number two, so we can go to the preview and we can turn those on. And click preview visible toolpaths. And there we go, there's sheet number two. Now we can use this dropdown box and make sheet number three active, and you'll see, that will show up the toolpaths for sheet three, and then we could preview those.
And that's what sheet three will look like and so on. So you can go to each sheet, turn on the toolpaths, preview those, and you can double check to make sure everything was created as expected. And there we go, that is how you could create toolpaths first and then nest the objects later and still be able to easily recalculate all of those toolpaths.
And the reason that works so well is because we organized the layers first, and then we associated those layers with the toolpaths. So all of those vectors are automatically connected to those toolpaths. And you can see, for example, if I were to take this right hand side piece, right click on that, and I'm gonna copy it to sheet number one, which is now empty.
Make that one active. Let's just say we moved it right into the center of the sheet somewhere. And right now sheet number one has no toolpaths on it. So what you can do is load that toolpath template again, get that cabinet one, open it up. This time I'm gonna click no, because I already have toolpaths for the rest of the sheets.
I only wanna apply it to this sheet so I'm gonna click no, to apply to all. And now it should create the toolpaths for just the sheet and you see, I have the pocket and for some reason it put the drill and profile down here, but that's okay we can bump those up there if we wanted, to move those around. And sometimes you may run into an issue where it did not create the toolpath correctly.
And it looks like we may have that case here and that's okay, all you have to do is turn on those three toolpaths. Right click on them, go down to recalculate and then recalculate visible toolpaths. Click okay, and now you'll see, that will fix any issues you may have. Now click preview and double check it was all created exactly the way you wanted it.
So hopefully those tips helped you out and don't forget if you ever wanna learn more training like this, I have much more indepth training in my Vectric master training course, where we go much deeper into all the different aspects of Vectric software.
So, if you wanna check that out, I have it linked down below in the description, but if you have any questions, just let me know.
So in this lesson, we're gonna look at exactly how to do that. So for this example, we're gonna be using this simple cabinet side. And as you could see, it has the profile shape, it has some shelf pinholes, and it has a groove in the back. And it already created a toolpath for all three of those objects.
And if we look at the 3D view, We can take a look at what the preview looks like. So we'll preview all and double click to remove their waste. And now you can see what our final product would look like. So that's our first step, we wanna make sure everything's working the way we want it to. And now we can go ahead and create toolpaths.
So let's go to the 2D view again. And what we can do is we can nest the shape. So we're gonna select all of this and use the nesting tool. But a very important step here is you want to organize the layers before you do this. Otherwise, all of these shapes are gonna be on the same layer and it's gonna be much harder to choose what you want to carve.
So up here in the layer menu, you could see, I already created a few new layers and you could do that just by clicking add new layer. So I made one for the profile, one for the groove in the back, one for the label, and one for the shelf pin holes. And it also made them different colors, which is my personal preference so you can easily tell what layer they are on.
So what we're gonna do is select the objects. So we're gonna right click on this outer shape. We're gonna go to move to layer and we are gonna put it on the profile layer. If you didn't have your layers created already, you can click add new layer down here at the bottom, but we're gonna click profile for the outer shape.
And then we're gonna select all these shelf panels. And right click on those and move those to the shelf pinhole layer, and then select the label here in the middle and right click, move that to the label level. And then we are going to do the back groove there, we're gonna right click and we'll put it on the groove layer.
And now you can see they're all different colors representing those specific layers. Now that's gonna make it much easier when we go to nest these. That's the most important part of this process. So now we're gonna switch over to nesting. We are going to use the nesting tool. We're gonna select all of these shapes and we are gonna set up our settings here.
Now, once again, I'm not gonna go too in depth on this. We're gonna just mostly focus on how to create those toolpaths. So I do wanna rotate my parts, I'm gonna rotate them 90 degrees just to see if that fits better. And I don't wanna mirror anything. I do want to not use the nest boundary, so I'm gonna turn that off.
Now, down here, we can set our number of copies. So if we zoom out, we can kind of get an idea of how many copies we might be able to fit in here. We might be able to fit two side by side. Uh, but I don't think it will. So we might be able to fit three in here so we could try three copies, click apply and click preview.
And there you go, it will rotate those shapes to find the best fitment. And as always, you can play around with the settings and keep clicking preview, and sometimes you'll get a more optimized result, which this here looks much better. And if we did more than three copies, it would spill over into another sheet.
And after this, I will show you an example of how to deal with something like that. So let's just click okay for this. And now we're dealing with three parts and if we go back to our toolpaths, we still have those three toolpaths that I originally created, except they're still in the same location as before. And if we look in the 3D view and reset the preview, you could see they're only for that one cabinet.
And if we just recalculate these toolpaths by right clicking on one of them, going to recalculate and click recalculate all you could see it's giving us an error because the nesting tool deleted those original shapes and created new copies. So now the toolpaths can no longer find the original vectors.
So that's why we're getting this error. We're gonna click, okay. And the way to fix this is to go back into the toolpaths settings. So I'm just going to double click on each one individually. And what you wanna do is go down here where it says vector selection. Right now it's set to manual, that means we would manually have to find each one of those vectors that associate with this toolpath.
But since we separated those into different layers, it is much easier to go to the selector tool and we can filter through our results by what layer they're on. So in this case, we want closed vectors, on the groove layer and you'll see, those are automatically get selected in the background there. And then our last step we wanna associate with the toolpath, that will automatically select those anytime we make changes.
Now click close and then recalculate that, and now you see, we have three grooves this time. So now we just have to do that for the remaining two toolpaths. So go back to the 2D view, double click on the drill toolpath. Go to the vector selection, we want closed vectors. With this one, you can go to only circles and you could filter it by the size of the circle, but in this case, they're all on the same layer anyways.
So we can just check the shelf pin holes, and we wanna associate with toolpath click close and you see, when you do that, it will switch it to automatic selection. That means anytime you place something on that layer, it will automatically be associated with this toolpath when you recalculate it. So I'm gonna click calculate.
Now we got more shelf pin holes there. Now we just need the profile toolpath so we could double click on that, go to the vector selection. We're gonna do close vectors on the profile layer and associate those with the toolpath click close, now click calculate. And there we go, now we have all of our toolpaths going onto all of the new vectors.
Now, if you click preview, you'll see now we get the exact results that we wanted and we could double click on that waste if we wanted to and see our final product. Okay, so that's our first example. The next example I'm gonna show you is gonna be when you have quite a few more parts and they spill over into other sheets.
So as of right now, in version 11, when you create toolpaths in a single sheet, you cannot copy them to another sheet. I hope Vectric adds that in as a feature in newer versions. But as of right now, you cannot do that. So if you have Aspire, VCarve Pro, or Cut2D Pro, you can get around this by doing what's called save as a toolpath template.
So if we check all three of these toolpaths and we click save all visible toolpaths as a template that will save those toolpaths and all of their settings as a template onto your computer. So I'm just gonna save those on the desktop. And I will just say cabinet toolpath template and click save. So now we can use that in additional sheets, or we can use that in new files.
So for example, if I go to this file here, where I have even more parts, so these will be all the parts for a cabinet. I could select all these parts. And you can see currently I have no toolpaths at all. I first want to nest these, so I'm gonna go to the nesting tool and I'm gonna use the same settings, except this time I'm gonna make five copies of all these, so it should make five cabinets total, and I'm gonna click apply and then I'm gonna click preview.
And now it just made five copies of each part, and neatly nested them into four sheets. And you'll see the original sheet is empty and that's okay. So now we need to make toolpaths for all four of those sheets. And if you did this without organizing the layers first, this would be very time consuming. So that's why it's best to organize your layers like I showed you in the last example.
And now we can import that toolpath template that we just created and it'll automatically create all the toolpaths for these four sheets. So we're gonna click a load toolpath template. We're gonna select that cabinet toolpath template we made, click open. And then it's gonna ask you, would you like to apply it to all of the sheets, if you didn't just click no, but in this case we do so click yes.
And now you let it do its magic. And now you'll have three toolpaths for each sheet. Unless for some reason, one of these objects didn't have a toolpath that was needed on that sheet. So for example, if one of these sheets did not have the shelf pin holes, then you wouldn't need a drilling toolpath on that sheet.
Okay, so now this will separate into different sheets. So right now we are on sheet number two, so we can go to the preview and we can turn those on. And click preview visible toolpaths. And there we go, there's sheet number two. Now we can use this dropdown box and make sheet number three active, and you'll see, that will show up the toolpaths for sheet three, and then we could preview those.
And that's what sheet three will look like and so on. So you can go to each sheet, turn on the toolpaths, preview those, and you can double check to make sure everything was created as expected. And there we go, that is how you could create toolpaths first and then nest the objects later and still be able to easily recalculate all of those toolpaths.
And the reason that works so well is because we organized the layers first, and then we associated those layers with the toolpaths. So all of those vectors are automatically connected to those toolpaths. And you can see, for example, if I were to take this right hand side piece, right click on that, and I'm gonna copy it to sheet number one, which is now empty.
Make that one active. Let's just say we moved it right into the center of the sheet somewhere. And right now sheet number one has no toolpaths on it. So what you can do is load that toolpath template again, get that cabinet one, open it up. This time I'm gonna click no, because I already have toolpaths for the rest of the sheets.
I only wanna apply it to this sheet so I'm gonna click no, to apply to all. And now it should create the toolpaths for just the sheet and you see, I have the pocket and for some reason it put the drill and profile down here, but that's okay we can bump those up there if we wanted, to move those around. And sometimes you may run into an issue where it did not create the toolpath correctly.
And it looks like we may have that case here and that's okay, all you have to do is turn on those three toolpaths. Right click on them, go down to recalculate and then recalculate visible toolpaths. Click okay, and now you'll see, that will fix any issues you may have. Now click preview and double check it was all created exactly the way you wanted it.
So hopefully those tips helped you out and don't forget if you ever wanna learn more training like this, I have much more indepth training in my Vectric master training course, where we go much deeper into all the different aspects of Vectric software.
So, if you wanna check that out, I have it linked down below in the description, but if you have any questions, just let me know.
