How to Make Multi-Colored Toolpath Previews In Vectric

Quick tip on how to change the colors of your project in the preview toolpaths 3d view, even if areas are on the same surface. We also look at how to add custom colors to your project. This works for Cut2D, VCarve, and Aspire.

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Video Transcript:

Hey everyone! In today's tip, we're going to look at how to change colors of different areas of your toolpaths even if they're on the same surface. And not only that we're also going to look at how to add in custom colors to match the correct colors of your project. To start, you can see we have this vcarve toolpath. And one of these is the clearance toolpath with a larger clearance tool. And then the other tool is the v-bit to sharpen all the corners and you can see if we go to our preview toolpaths and preview both of those. This is what we end up with. And right now we have just a global fill color of black and then our material color you can see is Canadian maple and our goal with this is to have the red stripes red, the white stripes white, the stars white, and then the union up here blue. So to do that. We first have to figure out what we want our material color to be. So you can see the surface of our material. Is this Canadian maple right now. And these colors have to be either the red color over here in the stripes or the blue color over here in the union and you can only choose one color for your material color. So I generally like to pick the larger color that has more area and that would be the red color for the stripes. And then I'll show you in a minute. What we will do for the blue color. So, in order to change the red stripes to the red color, we're going to go up to our sheet color and we're going to drop down the appearance and we're going to go all the way to the top, and we're going to use solid color. So we're going to select that. And you can see by default. It's going to be black. And of course we don't want this black. So we're going to drop this down and we're going to change this to a red color. Now, you can either pick the red color, right on the panel here. This is the default red color, and that's just a standard red there, and that's perfectly fine to use. But if you want to get more technical with your colors and use the exact color, you can see if we go back into the sheet, color, drop-down the color selection. And click more colors. You could see you have a more options here with the standard colors, or you can go over to custom. And in here. You can enter a custom color code to get the exact color that you want. So I actually went online and looked up the color for the American flag. And if you see here, we have the three different colors, the red, white and blue. And then also the color codes for each one of these. So we're going to start off with this red color. So we want this RGB color. So this would be red green and blue. So we're going to start with red. So we're going to take that number, right click on that, and copy it. Go into our Vectric panel here. And in the red color here, we're going to paste that. And then next, we're going to go to our green color, which is 34. We can copy that, place that in our green color here and paste and then lastly the 52 for blue. So we can either copy and paste that or just type it in here five, two. Okay, and then you can see the new color has changed from the current standard red color. So once you get those three numbers entered in, we're going to click ok. And then minimize this. And now the red color has changed to the actual red color, the flag. So that takes care of the larger color there. Next, we're going to look at the stripes that are white and the stars and since both of these are the color white and they're the only things carved, we can go up to our machined area color, turn on the global fill option that's going to fill anything that's carved with this color. We can drop down the color selector. And we can go back to the custom colors or this is a pretty standard white. So we're just going to use the white color there. So now we have our red and white stripes and are white stars, but now we have to figure out how to make the union blue. And in order to do that. We have to do a little trick right here. So we have to make a toolpath for that area to be able to change the color. So what we're going to do is switch over to our 2D View. And in the union area here, we're going to create a temporary rectangle, to be able to make a toolpath with. So let's close our preview. Let's switch over to our design Tab. And before we create these vectors, I like to place them on their own layer. So I like to go up to the layer panel, add a new layer and we'll make this temp vectors. And enter and then make sure that when selected to be the active layer and we can even change this layer color. Just so we know these are temporary. Let's just make it a red color and that's going to turn all the 2D vectors on this layer, the red color. So we're going to deselect that and now we need to create the rectangle where we want the blue area to be. So we're going to use our draw rectangle tool. And I'm going to snap in this upper left corner, drag down until it snaps to this end of a stripe. And then come down with my smart, snapping until it snaps to the other line there and then release. And now we have a rectangle in the area that we want blue. Now we're going to click close And then we can deselect that rectangle and you can see that is now red to let us know that it's on a separate layer. And now that's on our temporary vectors layer. So later on, when we go to save the toolpaths, we can hide that away. So it doesn't confuse us any. But that's why I like to keep it red. Just so we know that we don't want that with the final tool path. This is only temporary for the color preview. Okay, let's go back to our toolpath tab. And now we have to create a toolpath for this. So what I like to do is select the shape that we want to change the color. And for this one. I'm just going to create a pocket toolpath. And the start depth, we're going to leave at zero the cut depth. We only want to go very very minimal. So I usually go about .01 inches that just barely going to take any off the surface of the material. But that's just enough for us to change the color in the toolpath preview section. So now we need to select a tool for this. So I'm going to delete this tool. And now we're going to select a new tool. And for this, I like to use a very small end mill. We're going to use this 1/32 inch end mill. And the reason I use this is because I wanted to get very tightly into the corners. If you use a larger End Mill, you're going to be left with a radius Corner, unless you do a vcarving tool path or something like that. But to keep this simple, I just use the 1/32 inch end mill. And remember, this is only temporary. This isn't going to be something you're actually going to cut. So, using the 1/32 inch end mill for this large area is going to be okay, just for your preview. So we're going to click select. You can even add another tool in there if you wanted to, to clear the larger area and then the 1/32” will just clean the edges but this is going to be okay. So we're going to come down here and we want to change the name of this. So I'd like to do an all caps. “TEMP TOOLPATH” So we know this is not something we want to run, we want to make sure this is only temporary. So that's why I give it that name. And we're going to click calculate and you can see that looks blue. But the only reason that's blue right now is because that's the toolpath lines there, but you can see when we go to carve this. We're going to click preview selected tool path. That carved away. But now it's the white color and the reason it's white is because our global fill option is white. So now that we have more than one toolpath that we need to be different colors. We can no longer use the global fill option. So now what we have to do instead is use the toolpath color option. So we're going to select that and now we have to select an individual color for each toolpath. So right now we have this temporary toolpath selected and that one we want to be blue. So we're going to go up to the drop down for the colors. We're going to click more colors. We're going to go to custom again and we're going to use the custom color from the actual American flag. So let's go back to that. And you can see the RGB color here is 60-59-110. So we're going to take those numbers and put them in our custom color here. So 60-59-110 go to here will do 60, come down to green, do 59 and blue 110. And now you can see our new color is blue here and we're going to click OK. And you can now see our white areas are still no longer white. So now we have to go to those toolpaths and select them individually and drop down the toolpath color and we're going to go to white and we have to do those for both of those right. now, this first one is only the 1/4 inch end mill. And then the next one is the v-bit. We're going to change that color as well to white. And you can see that changed all the areas white that we needed to be white. Now you can see we do have a little bit of a stray line there of red, so we could clean that up by double clicking. On our temporary toolpath to edit this. And what I'm going to do is just add in another tool here. So I'm going to go to select. I'm going to select the 1/4 inch end mill, and click select. That will do that one first and then the 1/32” to clean up the corners. Now, I'm going to click calculate. And I'm going to preview the selected toolpath. But you can see this one is no longer blue because it's a new one. And now we have to change this one to the blue as well. So we're going to go to our color options here. We're going to go down two more colors. Go back to custom and we're going to enter in our 60, 59, and 110, and click okay. And now you can see that got rid of that red line there. And now you can see we have really nice clean colors and the corners are nice and sharp because we use that small End Mill and now our flag looks like an actual flag. So hopefully that helps you guys out. If you want to add more toolpaths, you can keep adding more and changing as many colors as you want with this. And then when you go to save your toolpaths, make sure you only save the ones you want to carve and do not save the temporary toolpaths that you do not want to carve. Like I said, those are only for changing the colors. So if this tip helped you guys out, make sure you like the video and subscribe for more.