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Answering student questions on how to copy shapes along a textured pattern and then also how to make toolpaths and 3D model the shapes in Vectric software. This lesson applies to Vectric VCarve, Aspire, and Cut2D.
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Video Transcript:
In our last quick tip, we learned how to add the wavy texture inside of a vector shape. And if you missed that quick tip, you can watch that in the link right above here. But in this quick tip lesson, we're going to dig deeper into this and show how to add these little hearts following along those paths.
And that will give you something that looks like this. And I will also show you how to create different tool paths for this type of shape. And also how to custom 3D model this shape if you have Aspire. And this example is just for these heart shapes, but you can get very creative with this and come up with all different sorts of designs.
So follow along in this lesson and comment below if you come up with something interesting. Instead of the lines, could they be individual baby hearts inside of a heart? Oh yeah, so to do that, you're going to have to do these wavelengths first to get your lines, like these will be your paths. And then you would take another piece of clip art.
We'll say the heart shape that you want to copy there. Okay, it went on top of this one. I'm going to move it. I'm going to shrink it down to the size we want. So I'll just make a small little size there to fit inside here. And we can place that anywhere we want. And to do this, what you would do is first create your texture lines and then bring in your heart, select that, hold shift, select your vector texture lines.
And then you're going to go to the tool called copy along vectors. And then you can either specify a distance between the copies, a certain number of copies if you know the exact number you want. In this case you'd probably do distance between copies also you want to make sure it says copy object so you want to select the object copy followed by the vectors you want to create copy along. Then we'll set our spacing let's say let's try one inch you can either force even spacing if you force even spacing it will move them slightly off of that one inch just to make them even. But if you turn that off it'll be exactly one inch so it's up to you. i'll do the force even spacing and then you can either keep them vertical like they are now or if you want to rotate along the Curvature of the line you can do align objects to curve. And then you can also create them on a new layer if you want And you can reverse direction if you want them to copy the opposite direction. But once you get all your settings done click copy and there you go. You'll see they will start to generate And of course you will have to do some it looks like I did select the outer line there. Oh, you know what that actually is going on the edge of the line.
That's why so you could either offset your heart inwards and trim that texture Or you can delete these afterwards that are out there, but either way you want to do that is fine. But that's basically it, and you can see these hearts are rotating along the curvature of those lines. And that's probably what you'd want.
But if you didn't want that, we can undo, select the heart, select the line, and if we turn off where it says align, and then click copy, and you'll see now they're all vertical. So those are those two options there. And I think that's actually a pretty cool little trick there, and then you can use the VCarve toolpath or the Pocket toolpath to cut all these little hearts.
And they were placed on a brand new layer, so that's easier for them to stay organized and hide them out of the way if you need to. As well as the texture lines, if you didn't need those anymore. I can show you an example too. Let me align those to the curve because I like that look a little bit better.
Also what I'll do is take the heart. I'm going to offset this outwards. So the hearts, the little hearts will stay in this shape. Which will select the heart, select the texture, and copy along, and copy. So there we go. And now you'll see if we no longer use this heart and we hide the texture. Now the hearts fit inside of the bigger heart, just by creating that offset rather than having to delete all the ones on the edge.
All depends on what you want to look like. Now obviously this one has an issue, so we can either move that or delete that. And you can just double click on these and drag them where you need them. So once you get this far, then we can go to the toolpath tab. Personally, I would probably v carve these, but it depends on the look you're going for.
I would probably use like a 90 degree or 60 degree v bit. Let's try a 90 degree and I'm going to go no flat depths, no start depths. And easy way to select all these is you can go up here to layer 2, right click, select layer vectors, and that's all the hearts. Then click calculate and preview. And you'll see that is what it ended up looking like.
Those are all carved. And then you can use the profile toolpath to cut the overall shape out. So that's one way to do it. If we reset that and selected the hearts and go to the texture toolpath and you want to click use selected vector as pattern. And then you can adjust your settings down here, whether you want it to ramp your max cut depths and any variation that you'd want.
Let's say we added a variation and let's go, let's try a 16th deep and then you could choose your tool you want. Generally you'll use a ball nose, a tapered ball nose, or a v bit for this toolpath, but you can use many different other tools for this. I'm going to try a 90 degree v bit, the same exact bit, just to see the difference between the two.
Now we're going to click calculate, and you'll see this is only cutting the outline of the hearts. And then we can click preview, and you'll see since we added a variation, some of them will be deeper than others. But if you want them all the same depth, then you would turn that variation off. But that can give you a different effect as well.
So something you can play around with, but that's definitely an option. So if you got this far in Aspire, you can go to the modeling tab, and we can split this view. Let me first close down the toolpath preview. So in Aspire, what I would do is first take the heart shape, the bigger heart shape below, and use create shape from vector outlines.
And if you wanted the pillow shape like you're talking about, I would do the curve profile most likely. And no limit for the height, and we can click applied to see what that looks like. You'll see that looks kind of big. So to make that smaller, we can reduce the angle That will start to bring it down.
Also, where that corner is, that sharp corner inversion, 11.5, there's this new option to preserve internal corners. We can turn that on, see if that helps. Okay. That kind of made too much of a corner there, so maybe not in this case. Probably turn that. That kind of looks better. So that looks pretty good.
And of course you can adjust the angle if you want it a little taller, a little shorter, depending on how much height you wanted on that. So that would be my first step, and we can name this big heart, and then we would click start new component, and we can select all the vectors on layer 2, which are the little hearts, and we can really keep the same settings and click apply and see what it looks like, and then adjust from there.
This will take a little bit longer to calculate, but There you go. And that adds them all as 3D. And then yep, you just name this one Little Hearts if you wanted to keep it nice and organized. And then click close. And there you go. Now you have two components in there. And you can carve this as a 3D model now.
And then of course you can add text in there or whatever you wanted to do. That's all for this video. Make sure you like and subscribe for more. And if you want to master your Vectric software, make sure you check out my Vectric training classes linked right here, where we go much more in depth, how to use the Vectric software step by step and included with my training courses is weekly Q&A calls where I can answer your questions one on one and get the support you need.
And if you want to watch another great Vectric tip, check out this video posted right here.
And that will give you something that looks like this. And I will also show you how to create different tool paths for this type of shape. And also how to custom 3D model this shape if you have Aspire. And this example is just for these heart shapes, but you can get very creative with this and come up with all different sorts of designs.
So follow along in this lesson and comment below if you come up with something interesting. Instead of the lines, could they be individual baby hearts inside of a heart? Oh yeah, so to do that, you're going to have to do these wavelengths first to get your lines, like these will be your paths. And then you would take another piece of clip art.
We'll say the heart shape that you want to copy there. Okay, it went on top of this one. I'm going to move it. I'm going to shrink it down to the size we want. So I'll just make a small little size there to fit inside here. And we can place that anywhere we want. And to do this, what you would do is first create your texture lines and then bring in your heart, select that, hold shift, select your vector texture lines.
And then you're going to go to the tool called copy along vectors. And then you can either specify a distance between the copies, a certain number of copies if you know the exact number you want. In this case you'd probably do distance between copies also you want to make sure it says copy object so you want to select the object copy followed by the vectors you want to create copy along. Then we'll set our spacing let's say let's try one inch you can either force even spacing if you force even spacing it will move them slightly off of that one inch just to make them even. But if you turn that off it'll be exactly one inch so it's up to you. i'll do the force even spacing and then you can either keep them vertical like they are now or if you want to rotate along the Curvature of the line you can do align objects to curve. And then you can also create them on a new layer if you want And you can reverse direction if you want them to copy the opposite direction. But once you get all your settings done click copy and there you go. You'll see they will start to generate And of course you will have to do some it looks like I did select the outer line there. Oh, you know what that actually is going on the edge of the line.
That's why so you could either offset your heart inwards and trim that texture Or you can delete these afterwards that are out there, but either way you want to do that is fine. But that's basically it, and you can see these hearts are rotating along the curvature of those lines. And that's probably what you'd want.
But if you didn't want that, we can undo, select the heart, select the line, and if we turn off where it says align, and then click copy, and you'll see now they're all vertical. So those are those two options there. And I think that's actually a pretty cool little trick there, and then you can use the VCarve toolpath or the Pocket toolpath to cut all these little hearts.
And they were placed on a brand new layer, so that's easier for them to stay organized and hide them out of the way if you need to. As well as the texture lines, if you didn't need those anymore. I can show you an example too. Let me align those to the curve because I like that look a little bit better.
Also what I'll do is take the heart. I'm going to offset this outwards. So the hearts, the little hearts will stay in this shape. Which will select the heart, select the texture, and copy along, and copy. So there we go. And now you'll see if we no longer use this heart and we hide the texture. Now the hearts fit inside of the bigger heart, just by creating that offset rather than having to delete all the ones on the edge.
All depends on what you want to look like. Now obviously this one has an issue, so we can either move that or delete that. And you can just double click on these and drag them where you need them. So once you get this far, then we can go to the toolpath tab. Personally, I would probably v carve these, but it depends on the look you're going for.
I would probably use like a 90 degree or 60 degree v bit. Let's try a 90 degree and I'm going to go no flat depths, no start depths. And easy way to select all these is you can go up here to layer 2, right click, select layer vectors, and that's all the hearts. Then click calculate and preview. And you'll see that is what it ended up looking like.
Those are all carved. And then you can use the profile toolpath to cut the overall shape out. So that's one way to do it. If we reset that and selected the hearts and go to the texture toolpath and you want to click use selected vector as pattern. And then you can adjust your settings down here, whether you want it to ramp your max cut depths and any variation that you'd want.
Let's say we added a variation and let's go, let's try a 16th deep and then you could choose your tool you want. Generally you'll use a ball nose, a tapered ball nose, or a v bit for this toolpath, but you can use many different other tools for this. I'm going to try a 90 degree v bit, the same exact bit, just to see the difference between the two.
Now we're going to click calculate, and you'll see this is only cutting the outline of the hearts. And then we can click preview, and you'll see since we added a variation, some of them will be deeper than others. But if you want them all the same depth, then you would turn that variation off. But that can give you a different effect as well.
So something you can play around with, but that's definitely an option. So if you got this far in Aspire, you can go to the modeling tab, and we can split this view. Let me first close down the toolpath preview. So in Aspire, what I would do is first take the heart shape, the bigger heart shape below, and use create shape from vector outlines.
And if you wanted the pillow shape like you're talking about, I would do the curve profile most likely. And no limit for the height, and we can click applied to see what that looks like. You'll see that looks kind of big. So to make that smaller, we can reduce the angle That will start to bring it down.
Also, where that corner is, that sharp corner inversion, 11.5, there's this new option to preserve internal corners. We can turn that on, see if that helps. Okay. That kind of made too much of a corner there, so maybe not in this case. Probably turn that. That kind of looks better. So that looks pretty good.
And of course you can adjust the angle if you want it a little taller, a little shorter, depending on how much height you wanted on that. So that would be my first step, and we can name this big heart, and then we would click start new component, and we can select all the vectors on layer 2, which are the little hearts, and we can really keep the same settings and click apply and see what it looks like, and then adjust from there.
This will take a little bit longer to calculate, but There you go. And that adds them all as 3D. And then yep, you just name this one Little Hearts if you wanted to keep it nice and organized. And then click close. And there you go. Now you have two components in there. And you can carve this as a 3D model now.
And then of course you can add text in there or whatever you wanted to do. That's all for this video. Make sure you like and subscribe for more. And if you want to master your Vectric software, make sure you check out my Vectric training classes linked right here, where we go much more in depth, how to use the Vectric software step by step and included with my training courses is weekly Q&A calls where I can answer your questions one on one and get the support you need.
And if you want to watch another great Vectric tip, check out this video posted right here.
