Practical Vectric® Tutorial: How to Merge 2 Designs
In this video tutorial, we dive deep into how to import and merge two police badge designs into one overlapped design.
Video Transcript:
in this tutorial we're going to take a look at how to merge two different designs into one and in this case we are merging two baltimore police badges into one file here and then we're going to v-carve all inside of here so let's go over and start a new file and i'll show you how to do this from start to finish so in this video we're using vcarve pro10.5 and we're going to start here with our job setup we're going to do a single sided our width we're going to make 30 inches we'll do our height 30 inches as well as our thickness we'll put 0.7
three quarters of an inch and our z zero position we're going to start from the material surface and our xy datum position we're going to start in the lower left-hand corner and we're not doing any 3d modeling so we won't need any settings down here and this setup is just for my example here you can set this up however you like and we're going to come down here click ok and the first thing we're going to do is import our badge files so to do that we're going to come here to import vectors and that's going to open up your file menu here and we have two badges here so let's select this one first click open and you can see that's going to import that right into here so we're going to move this to the side here and then we're going to import vectors again and we're going to select our second badge file and that imported that there and now when i import external files the first thing i like to do is check them over to see if they have any issues so first thing we're going to do the vector validator tool this blue check mark here let's select that and we're going to search all and that'll search our whole design for any errors and you can see right away we have three zero length spans we have two overlaps and 14 intersections so we're going to fix all this first so to fix the zero length spans it's real simple here just click this button here and now we have no more zero length spans now we have two overlaps and 14 intersections so we can click search all again and that'll bring up our errors right here on the screen now we can zoom in and clean these up one by one here and you can see the two intersections we have here so we can select this line and we can go into our node edit mode by typing the letter n on your keyboard that's the shortcut to go into node edit mode and there's a node right here we can delete if we hover over it and type the letter d on your keyboard that'll delete that node there and that should take care of that issue so now let's zoom out and we'll zoom into our next issue and the problem we have here is it's actually overlapped here so you can either fix this one with the trim tool with the scissors or we can select this with our node edit tool and we can delete this node right here and now it's going to automatically connect to the last node there and that should fix that issue there now we'll zoom into our next issue here and we'll select this one for the node edit mode let's delete this node typing the letter d on your keyboard and that one should be taken care of and let's zoom into this one the same issue over here click d on your keyboard to delete that node and you can see we still have an arc right here so we can hover over that arc and type the letter d to delete that arc and now we are going to have an open vector here so we will deal with that in a second let's zoom out see if we have any more issues we have a few more down here and this one here is not allowing me to zoom in any further so what i like to do is use our zoom tool up here select that tool and then you can make a box around the area you want to zoom into release the box and it's going to zoom in a lot closer and now we can select this in our node edit mode we can delete the node right here and that should take care of that issue now we'll zoom out and we have an issue right here okay this one we can just delete this whole item altogether clicking the delete key on your keyboard and zoom back out and looks like we have a few over here and this one here is not allowing me to zoom in any closer so we're going to use our zoom tool draw a box around it and now we're zoomed in and we're actually going to zoom in a little bit closer for that one so let's draw another box and i'm not sure what the error is here let's see if we can select this and click the delete key okay the error may actually be over here but we're zoomed in really close so sometimes it gets a little wacky when you get close so let's zoom back out we'll draw another box zoom in let's delete this note up here and we'll see if that fixes the issue so zoom back out and we have a few more down here these two actually are overlapping so we can trim that with the scissor tool i think that's all we have left so exit our tool here let's go to our scissor tool let's trim this and then close and now let's zoom back out and we'll go back to our vector validator tool search all and we are left with one intersection and that's right here so we'll zoom back in okay that is the spot that we said that we're going to have an open vector so we have to join that together so close and the easy way to do this is select this and we're going to join slash close vectors by moving endpoints to a common point so select that and you can see it connected these at a common point there now we'll zoom back out go back to our vector validator tool search all and now you can see we have no more issues and that's exactly what we want so click close and now that we have those issues taken care of the next issues i look for is right click go to selection and then select all open vectors and you can see it didn't give us a message so that means we do have open vectors and the best way to tell how many open vectors you have is down here at the bottom of your screen it will show the width and the height of the selected vector as well as what layer it is on and we only have one layer here so it's going to be on layer one so this is a very tiny vector so it would be very hard to find it selected in our drawing here so an easy way to find that open vector is to come up here to our zoom tool where you zoom active view to selected objects click that and it'll zoom right into our selected open vector and now that we can know where it's at we can zoom out and you can see that's a vector we do not need so we have that selected just click the delete key on your keyboard that will get rid of that now we'll zoom back out right click again go to selection and click select all open vectors and now you can see we have no open vectors in design that's exactly what we want so click ok now the next thing we'll search for right click go to selection select all duplicate vectors no duplicate vectors in design that's great as well we do not want overlapping vectors so click ok now that's the bulk of our issues taken care of last thing i like to do is select all of our vectors here go to your node edit mode and you can see the amount of nodes we have and a lot of times when you input vectors with curves instead of importing as a smooth curve it will import as a bunch of tiny little straight line segments here and that is not great for creating tool paths because it will take a long time to machine this because your tool path will be going point to point here to each one of these little lines here so it'll be best to convert this into a smooth curve so you won't have those kind of issues so let's zoom out here and we'll get an idea of what we need to convert and it looks like most of this we can actually convert because we have a lot of areas with the lotto nodes here so to do this we're going to go to our tool here curve fit and we're going to come to bezier curves and for this we're going to keep ourtolerance at .0
1 inches and that'll create our new vectors very close to the original vectors and then we're going to keep sharp corners so any sharp corners we're going to keep at a max angle of 60 degrees and you can adjust these settings however you like and the important part here we're going to replace selected vectors so it's going to delete the vectors we have selected and create all new ones with less nodes on the bezier curves so to do that let's click preview and it'll take a minute and now you see we have a lot less nodes and we can zoom in here and up here we have a lot less nodes as well so if you're happy how that converted just click ok and now we go back to the node edit mode you can see we have now been converted to smooth curves and that will take a lot less time to machine this because now the tool path is not going to follow those little tiny line segments it's going to follow this longer smoother curve instead and now let's zoom back out here and that takes care of all the issues i usually look for when importing external vectors so now we can right click to exit the node edit mode and now we can start our process of overlapping the vectors and merging them together so to start we're going to take our larger badge file here and we're going to rename our layer here so right click rename and we'll name this large badge and then click inside of here to accept that and now we're going to add a new layer and we're going to name this one small badge and then click inside of here to accept that and now we're going to click out here we're going to select our small badge here and then we're going to right click and we're going to go move to layer and we're going to move it to the small badge layer now when we come up here to our layers we can see if we turn off our large badge it's going to turn off that one and if we turn off our small badge it's going to turn off that one so now we have these on two separate layers and you'll see that will make it a lot easier on you when you're creating your design here so let's click out of here and now we're going to overlap our vectors so to do that let's select our large badge here we're going to double click on this to bring it to the transform mode and now we can click and drag it we'll drag it up here and we went a little too far let's drag it a little bit down here and now our small badge here we're going to select this and you can actually type the letter g on your keyboard that'll group it all together so now when we select one object here it'll select everything and if we double click on this let's move it over here and we can position this however you like here on top of the other badge and for right now i'm going to position it in an approximate location where i'm going to have it and we can reposition this in a second here but before we get it in its final position we have to figure out how we're going to carve this so in this case we want to carve the letters here on this badge as well as the letters on this badge so that means in the case of this larger badge file here it's going to carve the letters it's not going to carve inside the banner here it will carve the border of this banner here it will not carve this larger area here and then it will carve this smaller border here and then of course it won't carve the outer border here so that's what i like to do is find an object in our design that we want to carve and then every other item it will carve so you want to start from an object you definitely want to carve and then work your way out and figure out exactly what is going to carve and what is not going to carve so this outer line here will be our profile line so in the case of this larger badge this is set up exactly the way we want it so we're not going to mess with this at all and now if we go to our smaller badge here this is the badge that's going to overlap so this one we're going to have to work on a little bit creating offsets on the outer border here so if we go back to our example file and we zoom in here you can see we're going to carver letters we're going to carve the border of the banner here we're not going to carve the larger area here and then we'll have this smaller border in here we're going to carve we're going to skip a space here and then this outer border here is going to connect to the border of our larger police badge file and then the outermost line will be the line of our profile so this part here can get very confusing because there's a lot of offsets you have to think about and how you're going to merge them and carve them but let's go back and i'll show you how we're going to do this one so in this case we're not going to use this line here so let's ungroup these by typing the letter u on your keyboard that's the shortcut to on group and we're going to select this outer line here and we're going to delete it by clicking the delete key on your keyboard and this line here we're going to make our smaller profile to match this line here so what i like to do is go to your measure tool and we're going to measure the width of this opening so from this line we're going to select and we're going to select a point on this lineand you can see our distance is 0.1
05
so we're just going to round that to0.1
inches so let's click close and if we go back down here we're going to select our border of the small badge and we're going to come down here to our offset tool and we're going to go outwards andthe distance we're going to go 0.1 inches to match this border here and we're going to create sharp offset corners so any corners that are sharp it's going to keep that in our offset and i like to have this option selected here to select new so that way when we offset our line it's going to automatically select the new line in our offset so let's click offset here and that created our new line there so that is step one done now we have this first border here so let's go back to our design here that is this line here we just created so if we zoom in here we now have the line on the inside of this and the line on the outside of this and now we need another line here for this border here so let's go back to our design and for this offset we're going to try half an inchso let's erase this we'll go to 0.5 inches and since we had this option here to select new we already have this line selected so now let's click offset again and now it offsetted that half an inch and that looks a little bit large so we can undo that go to edit undoand let's just try 0.4
inches
click offset and that looks a little bit better so we'll keep it at that so let's go back to our design now we have this inside line now we need another line here and that'll be the same distance we madethe last one so 0.1
inches so let's go back hereand we'll go back to 0.1
inches and we already have this line selected so let's click offset and now that takes care of that border there now the last border we need to create is going to match this border here so let's go back to our design it's going to match our border here so let's go back here we're going to measure this we're going to close this select our measure tool and we'll just measure from this line to this lineand we got 0.3
6 so it's about 3 8 of an inch so we'll close this let's select the last line we created and we'll go to the offset tool again and we're going to go outwards and we'lldo 0.3
5
and click offset and now that's the last line of our borders there so you can see that is a little bit confusing but once you do it a few times you should be able to get the hang of it so now we're going to close this and you can see that whole time we had our small badge layer active so all of the new lines we just created are on our small badge layer so if you hide this you can see it's going to hide all those so let's turn that back on now we want to position this to a better location where we want it to be the final location and in this case we're going to try to match this inner border here with this border here on the larger file so this is why i mentioned it's best to put on two separate layers now we can take our small badge here we can right click and we can go down here to select layer vectors and that's going to select everything on our small badge layer so let's zoom back in to move this over we can use the arrow keys on our keyboard just to nudge it in the direction we want to go so in this case we're going to go to the right so we'll just click our right key until it gets to about where we want it and before we finalize that let's look on the side here we can adjust this however you like to going up or down or left or right and this doesn't look too bad to me zoom back up here that looks pretty close there maybe we'll zoom in here we'll go to the left just a little bit until that point lines up there maybe one more that's pretty good there let's zoom back out we'll check it one more time doesn't look too bad down here and i think we'll leave that right where it is there and now let's deselect these by clicking out here in the white space now you can see we have a lot of overlapping vectors inside of here so we're gonna have to get rid of the large badge vectors in the background here so there's several ways you can do that but i'll show you the method i like to use so we're going to zoom in here in the end we want the vectors on the large badge file here to go into our smaller border here and we'll go back to our design out here i'll show you what i mean here you can see all the vectors that touch this border of the small badge here they actually go into that border so we want to connect those at the end so let's go back to our design so you can come in here with the scissor tool and just start cutting away at this and that will take some time to do and can get very confusing with all these different lines inside of here so what i like to do is select our line here that we're going to connect toand our distance between these is 0.1 inches so we're going to go to our offset tool and i'm going to go about half of that and we're going to go inwards so we want to be in between these two lines here and i'm going to go.0
inches that's about half and click offset and now you can see we have a new line here in between these two lines here now i'm going to close this and before we go any further we're going to select all these new lines we just created we'll even select our original line there and we'll go back to our node edit mode and you can see when you offset a curved line a lot of times it'll convert it into straight line segments and now that brings us back to the issue we had in the beginning where we have too many nodes so to fix that we'll go back to our curve fit tool and we're going to make it to the bezier curves click preview and now you can see it got rid of about 90 percent of those nodes so let's click ok and go back to the node edit mode just to confirm and now it looks a lot better with the smoother curves so now we'll right click to get out of the node edit mode and now we can start trimming our vectors so if we zoom in here that last offset that we created that is just a temporary offset for now and we're going to right click this and we're going to come down to move to layer and we're going to move that to the large badge layer now we're going to come up here and we're going to hide the small badge and we're going to make our large badge the active layer now let's click out of here now that got rid of everything in our design there for the smaller badge except for the temporary line that we made so now to get rid of the design inside of here we're going to click and drag to select all of the items inside of this smaller badge here and it's okay if you select a few items outside it's not going to matter now we're going to hold our shift key and deselect all of our boundaries here and then lastly we're going to hold the shift key and select this boundary again and it's important to do that because you want this vector selected last and now if we come over here we're going to go to our subtract tool and that's going to subtract everything we selected first from the last vector we selected and that's why it's important to select it in that order so now we're going to click subtract and now you can see it got rid of everything inside of there and then kept everything outside so now we can come back up here we can turn our small batch layer back on and now all that's left to do is to do some trimming with the scissor tool so let's come over here we'll select our scissor tool and let's zoom in here we want our outer profile vectors to be connected so let's trim this and let's trim this now that's connected on the outside we can come up down here and do the same let's trim this and trim that and now we have an outer profile line around the entire two badges here and then we want to come over here and now we want to connect our smaller border here so all you really have to do is trim the vectors inside of this intersection here and these ones are okay because we can delete the entire line so after we do the top one let's come down here to the bottom one like i said that one's okay we just want to trim this intersection here and these other ones are okay as well and then we want to make sure we have this checkbox here it's going to automatically rejoin the vectors we trimmed into closed vectors so let's click close and now after that's done we can select these lines by holding the shift key and select all four of these lines you can see those are no longer connected to anything so we can click delete on your keyboard and that got rid of all those now the only thing we have left is to trim these vectors with our outermost line here and there is a few ways to do this as well you can see if you select this outer line first and then hold the shift key and select this vector that's overlapping if you select the subtract tool it's going to do exactly what we wanted to do there but you can see if we select multiple vectors we'll select this outer shape first hold the shift key and if we selected all the vectors that we want to trim and we come over here and click the subtract tool you can see it worked up here but after it does that it changes the order we have selected and if we were to click that again you can see it's going to get rid of stuff that we don't want to get rid of and every time we click it it's going to do some funky things that we don't want it to do so if we undo that it'll bring our vectors back so i found the easiest way to do this is just the manual way of the scissor tool and just come in here and we'll trim those vectors we do not need that are overlapping and that's why we created that line in the middle there so we do have some overlap here because it's a lot easier to trim when you have the overlap so we'll just trim everything that's overlapping and that's fairly easy to do on this design there's not too much and make sure you keep zooming in and out checking your progress sometimes with the trim tool it'll trim something outside of your view that you did not recognize so you sometimes you have to undo and go back and trim the objects that you actually want to trim and it can get frustrating if you did a lot of trim and then found out at the beginning it trimmed something you didn't want to do and you have to undo everything you just did and you can see now we have everything trimmed that we actually want to trim so it looks pretty good so we'll close this and that's going to automatically close all of our vectors there and that's pretty much all we have to do for the design work now before we create our tool pass i like to right click one more time go to select all open vectors make sure we have none in their design and you can see we do have one open vector and it's a very small one again we can use our trick up here by zooming to the selected object and we zoom out here you can see it's a little tiny one there so we can delete that just clicking delete on your keyboard and zoom back out and that should take care of all of our open vectors and then one last time we're going to check our vector validator tool search all and we have zero issues so that's perfect so let's click close and then the last thing we're going to do is select all of our design here and we're going to center it using our line selected objects if you don't have this panel here you can find it inside of this transform objects to your line selected objects and we're going to select this one here to center our objects into the center of our material now that's perfectly centered and now that this is all done you can scale this to whatever size you want the finished piece to be and you can edit it however you like and once you get it where you like it we're going to come up here switch to our toolpath tab and with all of our vectors selected we're going to hold the shift key and deselect our outer shape there because that's going to be our profile so everything inside here we want to v-carve so we're going to come over here to our v-carve toolpath and in this case our start depth is going to be at 0 because we're starting from the top of our material we're not going to create a flat depth because we don't have very wide areas that we're carving out a lot of these areas are very small and in this case we're going to use a 60 degree v-bit and you can select whatever bit you like for your project and we're not going to use the clearance tool because we do not have a flat tip so we can scroll all the way down here to the bottom we can give this a name if you like let's say if we wanted to name it vcarve dash 60 degree
so we know we're using a 60 degree v-bit and we'll click calculate and you can see before it calculates it's going to give us this error here saying warning our tool will cut through our material so let's click ok we'll see what's going on there and you can see by our tool path preview it carved a lot up here that we do not want to carve and because we didn't specify a flat depth it's going to cut very deep into our material there and it's going to actually cut all the way through which is why it gave us that warning but you can see everything else looks pretty good it's carving our letters and our border there on the banner just like we wanted and it's doing the same down here but you can see this object here it's carving the opposite of we want so we can preview this better if we go to our 2d view and we have our tool path selected so up here we're going to do toggle to our solid view select that and it's going to show in purple all the areas it's going to carve and we zoom down here you can see it's not going to carve these small lines it's going to carve everything else and leave that small line raised and we want to do the opposite effect of that and if we zoom out you can see up here it's going to do the same thing we do not want to carve this large area here so to fix this it's very simple just select this one item here and we're going to delete that and zoom out we're going to select this item here delete that as well and let's zoom back out we'll come down here and this border around this object to select that we're going to delete that and then we want this inner border here too so this border here delete that this one here delete that and this one here we'll delete that so pretty much everything that this purple line was touching on the outermost side we're going to delete and now that we have those deleted we can right click on our tool path and click recalculate and it's going to say we successfully recalculated click ok and now you can see the purple is now on the smaller lines which is what we want to carve and zoom back out we'll see how it looks up top and you can see we no longer have that large area being carved so now it looks very good we'll go to our preview again by going to our 3d view let's zoom back out and we can preview selected toolpath and you can see that looks pretty good we have our material set to medium wood and we have our global fill color set to black just to preview this better and now the final thing we have to do is create the profile tool path so to do that we'll go back to our 2d view let's close this we're going to go to our profile toolpath and we're going to deselect everything and we're going to only select our outermost boundary there and we're going to come up here to our start depth it's going to be 0 because we're starting at the top of our material our cut depth is going to go all the way through our material at three quarters of an inch we're going to use a quarter inch end mill so we're going to leave this alone you can select whatever kind of tool you want to use and for our machining vectors we're going to go on the outside of our line so it'll be the outside of this outermost vector line and that's usually what you want to do to create a profile because that'll keep our dimensions exactly what we set and we're going to ramp our plunge moves this will put less wear and tear on your end mill by ramping into your tool path rather than plunging straight down into it so our distance i like to do double the distance of your diameter of your end mill so in this case we have a quarter inch end millwe're going to go 0.5
inches which is half an inch and that'll be double and then you can add tabs if you like to hold your project in there while you cut it out just for this example i'm not going to use tabs and then we can give this a name i'm going to give this profile dash quarter inch and we could do e m for endmill so click calculate and now you can see it created that profile toolpath so we have our vcarve already previewed so in this case we have this new one selected we can just do preview selected toolpath so click that and there's our profile toolpath and since we didn't use tabs we can get rid of this material in our preview here by double clicking and now that got rid of that material and now we have a final preview of what our project will look like and you can zoom in check it out make sure you like everything the way it looks before you go to carve it and in this case it looks very good so we're going to keep it as is so we can click close and then the final step is to save to gcode so we come down here to save tool pass and in this case we have the x-carve as our post-processor but you want to come in here and select whatever machine you're using as well as the correct units so if you're using inches select inches if you're using millimeters select millimeters so you want to select the tool path you want to save if you select both of these toolpaths and you have this option up at the top here visible to pass to one file you can see we're going to get an error because the x-carve is not capable of doing an automatic tool change so in this case you're going to have to do one tool path at a time so we're gonna first select our 60 degree and select your post processor and click save tool pass click that open up your file menu you can save it as a gcode file click save and now that toolpath is ready to go and then after you're done with that deselect our vcarve toolpath select our profile toolpath make sure that's the one up here and now we can come down here to save tool pass and it automatically takes the name that we named it down here so that's why it's helpful to specify what bit you're using so when you load it on your machine you'll instantly know right away what tool to use and we'll click save toolpath and now our toolpaths are all saved and ready to be run on your machine and then you just have to run both of these toolpaths separate so it's usually best to do your v-carve first that way your material can be held down without being loose and then run your profile last so that way your shape can be loose at the end and will not have to do any carving in between after and before you close things down don't forget to save your actual file here by clicking file save and you can give it a name however you like we're gonna do baltimore badge merge and all the link to this file if you like to download it in the description so we're going to click save and like i said that was just an example using these badges you can use this technique on any two shapes or even multiple shapes if you like you
This tutorial covers many different lessons that are explained more in depth in my Vectric® Master Training Course:
