Hey y'all.
Welcome to part 14 of my series on the Vectric software titles for the Absolute Beginner.
Before we get started today...
...let me restate that I am in no way sponsored...
...nor endorsed, nor affiliated...
...with Vectric Ltd., nor any other company.
I'm doing this series of videos...
...to help the person who has never done anything like this before...
...get in to the Vectric software...
...start, and complete a project from within the software.
In this video, I'm going to get into the basics of Bitmap Tracing and Node Editing...
...in VCarve and Aspire software.
So in order to get going, let's go ahead and create a new file.
This is going to be a single-sided job.
I'm going to make my job size 12 inches wide in X...
...12 inches high in Y...
...and the thickness of my material is 3/4 of an inch.
I'm going to set my Z zero position to the material surface...
...and I'm going to set my X, Y datum position to the center of the material.
For our purposes here, since this is not a 3D project...
I'm going to leave my modeling resolution set at Standard...
...and the Appearance, I'm going to make...
...let's go for maple...
...to make it easier for you to see what's going on out here.
We'll go ahead and click OK, and get started.
Before we do anything else here in the Vectric software...
...I'd like to take a couple of seconds to talk about...
...the types of files we can import into VCarve.
We can import just about any type of photograph, line-drawing...
...clipart...
...or what-have-you into the software. That's physically possible.
But I'm going to offer some free advice that's worth every penny you're paying for it.
When you're just starting out, try to keep your bitmaps simple.
I have a couple of examples here...
...and the first one is a full-color photograph.
I know the temptation is there to take something like this...
...and attempt to do a bitmap tracing on it.
But until you get a few under your belt and start learning...
...some of the nuances, and ins and outs...
...of tracing a bitmap in the software...
...the better bet would be to go for something a lot simpler.
This photograph has several problems.
We have a lot of lens flare here on the lights and the chrome.
We have some edits to the photograph, down here to hide the license plate.
And just overall, we have a lot of reflections going on here...
...within the vehicle itself.
I mean we have these reflections in the hood...
...we've got reflections along the sides here, and down on this fender.
We have a very busy background.
This, in my opinion, would be a poor subject for a bitmap trace...
...especially in this condition.
Now, as this is a beginners tutorial...
...with a rather basic overview of the process of bitmap tracing...
...I've chosen a very simple design.
This is just a piece of line art...
...that I found online, that is in the public domain...
...that we can use... whoops...
...that we can use for this example.
So again...
...this is just some unsolicited advice...
...that as you're just starting out...
...pick a few simple projects...
...learn some of the nuances of bitmap tracing...
...before you move on to more complex designs.
So we'll go ahead and we'll get started in VCarve...
...and import that line drawing into the software.
That is simplicity itself.
There are a couple of ways of doing it.
One is we can come up here under File Operations...
...to this icon right here; Import Bitmap for Tracing...
...or we can go up to the File menu...
...come down to Import...
...then Import Bitmap.
They both do exactly the same thing.
So it doesn't really matter which one we choose.
Since I'm here, I'll choose this one.
I'll Import Bitmap, now I'll navigate to the folder...
...where I have my image file...
...and double click it to load it into the software.
When it first loads, you'll see this pink dotted border around it.
That indicates that it is selected and active.
If I click off to the side to deselect, you'll notice how it goes grayish.
But if I click anywhere on that bitmap...
...the pink border comes back and the black is more bold.
We can treat this like any other set of vectors, to a point.
With it selected, I can click again and we get our resizing handles out here off on the corners...
...and our square here in the center that will allow us to move it around.
Now I don't want to move it.
It was imported centered on my X zero, Y zero...
...but I do want to enlarge it a little bit.
So I'll hold down the Shift key...
...and click on this box here and kind of drag it out a little bit...
...just to kind of make it a little bit larger.
And I'll click off to get out of Move and Transform mode.
Click it once again just to select it.
Now to start the bitmap trace...
...we'll come up over here under Create Vectors...
...to this bottom icon here to the far left...
Trace Bitmap - fit vectors to selected bitmap.
I'll click that icon...
...and you'll see how...
...suddenly our drawing went a little bit gray...
...but we still have the pink border around it.
I'm going to kind of go...
...back and forth, up and down a little bit here, but generally speaking I'm going to start at the top.
The Type of Tracing to Use:
...this is a black and white piece of clipart, here...
...so we'll select Black and White.
If I was using a color image...
I would select Color.
Now that's going to be outside of the scope of this particular video...
...because, again, this is just the basics.
Now in Black and White...
...we have here the number of colors, and the threshold of those colors.
You'll see that our slider is right in the center.
What that means is, if we zoom in here toward the center of our bitmap...
...we can see all of these colors;
...the black and the various shades of gray have been made one standard shade of gray in here.
If I adjust this slider up...
...you'll notice how the lines here...
...are starting to run together and blur together.
They're getting heavier and fatter.
As we change the threshold here and change the number of colors that were selecting...
...more and more will be included in this bitmap tracing.
If I go back down here to 50...
...we see that we have a lot more white in the center here.
If we zoom out we can see that we have two separate lines out here...
...that kind of border this area of the window rubber.
If I stay backed out a little bit...
...and increase this, you'll notice that all of the lines start to run together.
This is a personal preference setting here. There is no magic number.
You may want to select a higher threshold, you may want to select a lower threshold.
But as we go lower, you'll see how some of these lines are starting to disappear.
We want to keep a certain level of detail...
...but we don't want to blend everything together to where it looks like one big mass.
One of the things that I've learned to do...
...just in getting started, is go ahead and accept everything that's here...
...and just click Preview.
Now when we click Preview you'll see how it followed the lines that we had.
Sure, it didn't cover all of the pixelization.
It tried to draw vectors that estimated that angle, this curve, and this angle down here.
We have all of our lines surrounded.
We have a little bit of noise, which I'll show you how to deal with...
But basically everything is visible.
I can see that it did a fairly good trace.
As a matter of fact I'm kind of surprised at how well it did trace.
So I think I'm going to leave my color threshold here...
...and not mess with it any further.
The Corner Fit down here is...
...how tightly do we want these vectors to hug the corners?
The looser our corner fit...
...the more of a tolerance it kind of adopts here.
In other words this sharp angle might not be as sharp as it would otherwise.
We have one vector running at a diagonal here...
...rather than running straight sideways, then down around this set of pixels, then over this way.
If we tighten up that corner fit more...
...it might go ahead and straighten out, and then make this zigzag here.
It's not really important that it does hug these pixels 100%.
What we're looking for is the overall picture.
We can see here we've got a little bit of pixelization, but not much.
This is actually pretty good for a first try.
The Noise Filter.
You have a scale running from 1 to 10 pixels.
I currently have this set on 2.
Meaning that if I have any stray single pixels out here...
VCarve is going to ignore it.
Now I can change that...
...bring it up to, let's say, 6 for example.
What that would mean is anything less than 6 pixels...
...VCarve would ignore as just stray noise.
Let's go ahead and Preview that...
...and it did make a little bit of difference.
If you noticed, we had this little pixel here surrounded.
By changing that to 6 pixels it ignored this open spot.
It ignored these pixels here as well.
And we've cleaned up some of the stray pixels that were up here...
...that we would normally have to come back and clean up.
So it's a balancing act.
You have to balance how much detail you actually want...
...versus how much noise in this photograph you want to include in your bitmap tracing.
And this is the stumbling block that a lot of people trip over.
It's that Noise Filter that gets them.
They want as much detail as they can possibly get...
...so they'll tend to set the Noise Filter really low.
What that does is it includes...
...every single pixel within the photograph...
...whether they're actually wanted or not.
So leaving that at 6... I think I'm going to go ahead and leave that right there.
Bitmap Fading has to do with the display of the bitmap itself.
Now you see what tone of gray the bitmap is right now?
The Bitmap Fading:
This scale here indicates the amount of fading...
...VCarve is applying to the bitmap.
So if we want these lines to be a little darker...
...we will apply less fading.
You see how when I move that slider down, the outlines get darker.
This, again, counts for the display only.
It doesn't have anything to do with the vectors themselves.
It's just how this bitmap is displayed when we turn it off and on.
If that's a little bit too dark...
I can go ahead and lighten that up...
... just a little bit so I can see the original lines in the bitmap...
...but I can also see my vectors to either side.
So with all things being equal...
... this is actually a pretty good trace right out of the gate.
I'm going to go ahead and accept this tracing and we can get in and start cleaning it up.
So I'll click Apply.
Before I close this, let me just reiterate...
...a lot of this is personal preference.
There is no magic number here for Bitmap Fading...
...for the Noise Filter, or for the Corner Fit.
There's also no magic number here for the Number of Colors or Threshold.
Your best bet is to make one adjustment...
...Preview that adjustment...
...zoom in zoom back out, look at the whole picture.
It's also very easy to lose your sense of perspective and lose your sense of scale.
It's real easy for me to get in here, zoom in real tight...
...and focus on a little detail here...
...forgetting that the entire piece...
...is not big enough to even really see that detail.
It's real easy to focus on a detail that's going to be lost through machining or sanding.
So do zoom in and make your adjustments and your cleanups during this process...
...but zoom back out to full-size on occasion...
...and take a look at what you have.
You'll soon develop a feel for what you need to worry about and what you need to just ignore.
Because, again, it's very easy to get bogged down on something that is probably going to be machined away.
So after hitting Apply,
I'll hit Close...
...and our bitmap is traced.
To get a better look at the quality of the tracing...
I'm going to come up to the Layer Manager...
...and click on it.
I can turn off the Bitmap Layer by clicking that light bulb.
Come back down here...
...and all we have now is our tracing.
I'm going to talk about one more thing here real quick with the Bitmap Layer on.
Something to remember is...
...when you do a bitmap trace, especially on a definitive dark line like this...
...VCarve is going to trace a vector to the inside of that line...
...and to the outside of that line.
If you look at all of these vectors here, that's exactly what has happened.
It's traced to the outside of this headlight ring...
...then it traced the white portion to the inside of this headlight ring.
The same thing with the rim of the bulb itself.
Up in here, where the two rings get real close together...
...it kind of tapered off and didn't connect these up.
That's okay.
Again, this is one of these details that you could drive yourself crazy with...
...attempting to connect these vectors here to make these all separate vectors...
...but when you back out and look at the whole thing...
...you see it doesn't really matter.
That's just another little added detail in there...
...that's not going to make much of a difference in the entirety of this picture.
Some things will make a difference, and you'll soon develop an eye for what those things are.
But keep in mind that it's going to trace to the inside and to the outside of these lines.
So let me go ahead and turn off our Bitmap Layer so that we're working with just the vectors in this tracing.
After the bitmap trace has been done, the first thing I want to do is I want to check for open vectors...
...and I want to check for duplicate vectors.
So I'll right-click, come down to Selection
Select All Open Vectors.
There are no open vectors in the design. Good.
Then I'll right-click...
Select All Duplicate Vectors.
There are no duplicate vectors in the design. Okay.
Before we get into cleaning up the image...
...we also need to keep in mind that all of these are separate vectors.
We can select them and edit them individually...
...which is what we want for right now.
Probably one of the first things I want to do...
...to get started cleaning up this trace...
...is we'll go up here, and I look for anything that looks like a rectangle.
I'll select it and just delete it.
These rectangles here...
...when VCarve did the tracing...
...I'll turn on the bitmap layer...
...there was just enough of a gray area in here...
...that VCarve saw this as something that I may want to be carved out.
I don't necessarily want those spaces in there.
I want to go ahead and just get rid of these little rectangular pieces...
...because it's just one more of those little details that will probably get machined away...
...and never really be seen.
These out here; this is a judgment call.
Personally, I think I'm going to get rid of them because I don't think they really add to the drawing.
Down here, I'll leave these larger ones because I think they do add to the drawing.
But again, in here...
...I want to go ahead and get rid of these smaller ones.
I'm just selecting them and tapping Delete on my keyboard.
So now I'll look around see if I have anything else.
This takes a bit of patrolling around...
...and looking to see if there is anything else.
Because we ran our noise filter as high as we did...
...that pretty much cleaned up most of it for us.
With this drawing, it's actually ready to v-carve.
But I've got a couple of things here that bug me.
This is just my opinion, but these vents down here need work.
We can see, if I turn on my Bitmap Layer...
...and I zoom in on the vent here, what we actually have...
...is we have an open area here...
...then this dark rectangle...
...another dark rectangle, another dark rectangle.
That also blends in with the outline of this bumper guard right here.
So I'm going to get into a little bit of Node Editing...
...to kind of clean these up a little bit...
...and give a better indication of what this is supposed to be, because right now I can't tell what that is.
I'm going to start with this one right here.
This doesn't follow the bitmap very well.
I'm going to clean it up just slightly.
The way I'll do that is I'll zoom in on it, with it selected...
...and I'll tap the letter N on my keyboard to go into Node Editing Mode.
In Node Editing Mode, what this does...
...is it gives us a representation of the various points...
...that V Carve is going to use to calculate the toolpath.
Now if you've looked at a little bit of g-code before, you'll know that the bit will start here, for instance...
...and you'll have a set of numbers in X and Y, where the bit is going to go next.
In this particular vector, if we look we see this little arrow here.
The green point is the starting point, and that little arrow shows us the direction this vector was drawn in.
So our starting point is here and the next point in line is at the top corner of this vector.
That's the direction this vector was drawn in.
What I want to do is, I want to try to make this vector match the contours a little bit better here.
Now as I said before, the green point is the starting point.
So that's where I usually begin my editing.
If you notice my cursor pointer here, when you're in Node Editing Mode...
You just have the little arrowhead.
But when I get over a point, it changes to that set of crosshairs with the box in the middle of it.
If I get up here next to a vector, a little tilde appears underneath that arrow.
That's letting me know that I can choose this span of a vector...
...or I can choose that point and make modifications to it.
One of the easiest modifications is to just simply move it.
I'll put my crosshairs over that point, click, hold, you'll see it turns red...
...then I can drag it.
And I want to put it about in this corner right here...
...then release.
That kind of straightened this vector out a little bit.
But now I want to come up here, and I want to move this point over here...
...and move this point over here.
That's a little bit better.
And that gives me more definition.
Now, again, you could drive yourself crazy here, moving points around...
...making this point hug this, and converting this to a line so you get a sharp 90° angle here...
I'm not going to bother with that.
I'm going to just leave it be.
That's a little bit better indication that this is an opening here.
To get out of Node Editing Mode, because I'm finished with this vector...
I'll just come out, away from any vectors...
...right-click...
...then right-click again, and I go back to Standard Selection Mode.
Now for this section right here...
...this is supposed to be a space in between these two rectangles.
So I'm going to try to indicate that space between these two rectangles a little bit better.
I'll do that by just coming over here under Create Vectors to Draw a Rectangle.
I'll come back up inside this vector here...
Click and drag downwards...
...to about right here.
That looks a little bit better.
Then I'll Apply...
...Close.
And I'll come up here and select this...
...again, kind of resize it by dragging it up a little further...
...up to the top.
I didn't really need to go to the top.
That's okay.
I'll leave it like that.
Click off to the side...
...come back over and select this round vector here...
...and I'm going to just, using my cursor keys, kind of bump this over...
...and bring it down.
Now it's time to go ahead and trim some of this away.
So I'll go over here under Edit Objects...
...to the Interactive Trim Tool: The Scissors.
And I want to cut that away...
...this away...
...and this away.
So now I have this shape here.
I'll close that Interactive Trim Tool and back out.
As for down here, I can just go ahead and select this vector, and delete it.
So that gives me a little bit more of an indication of a space in between here.
Now, again, I could go crazy and add a little bit more detail...
...by making another horizontal rectangle here...
...but, again, zoom out and you can see just how big that detail is.
So I'm not going to bother with it.
I will, however, go over here and do something very similar.
Here we see this vector is straight up and down...
...so I'm not going to bother that.
I am, however, going to create a rectangle here instead of this teardrop.
And then I'll also do another rectangle here.
So, again, come over to Draw Rectangle, and I'm just going to follow this little rectangle here.
Good enough.
Then come up in here...
...create another rectangle there...
Good enough.
Apply, Close.
Now I come back here and just select, then delete that one...
...grab my scissors, come up here and trim this, trim this...
Come down here, and yeah, I think I'll go ahead and trim this, and that.
So it's a little bit of an odd shape, but what the heck.
We'll just see if it makes any difference.
Now I can zoom out and take in the entire drawing.
All of that was done with the Bitmap Layer turned on...
...so that I could follow my design down here.
So, again, I'll go ahead and shut off the Bitmap Layer...
...click off...
...take a look and see if there's anything else that stands out to me.
I don't see anything, but there's only one way to find out.
That is to go ahead and hold down the Ctrl button...
...tap the letter A to select all of the vectors.
We'll come over here and we'll Group them.
So now when it's time to calculate the toolpath, if I just select any vector, I select all of them.
Once again I want to go ahead and make sure that I'm centered in the material, which I wasn't.
We'll close that...
...and we're ready to calculate toolpaths.
I'll come up here and switch over to the Toolpath tab.
And I'm going to v-carve this pattern into my piece of material.
So I'll select a v-carve toolpath.
My Start Depth is going to be 0.0
I want to start at the surface of the material.
I am NOT going to cut to a Flat Depth.
When it comes to v-bit selection, it's a fairly large drawing...
...but I want these carvings to be nice and deep.
So I'm going to try this with a 60° v-bit.
We'll see what it looks like.
If I think it's cutting too deep, I may back up and try a 90° v-bit.
But we'll check it with the 60° and just see how it works.
I'm not going to use a flat area clearance tool...
...because I'm basically v-carving the outlines.
I'm going to leave everything else the way it is...
...and we'll click Calculate.
We can see our toolpath here.
We have maple selected.
I'll set my toolpath color to black so that we can see it against this light material.
And I'll preview that toolpath.
And there we have it.
It cut all the detail that we need.
We have this good delineation between the hood and the fender.
I still don't know if that's a dome light or a rear-view mirror, but whichever it is...
We have our little strap handles here.
Everything appears to be good.
I can zoom in here and take a look.
Those vents look a lot better than they would have, I think, had we not included our rectangles over here.
I guess they could use a little more detail...
...but, again, if we zoom out to full size...
...we could drive ourselves crazy...
...putting detail into these little vents, when they're probably not going to be noticed by anybody.
And, again, how much of that is going to be sanded away or lost during machining?
I want to see how deep this cut at the maximum depth during this v-carve process.
To do that, I can just bring my cursor over here and hover over the toolpath name.
And we can see if we look down at the second line from the bottom...
...it cut almost 1/10th of an inch into the material.
That's a pretty deep carve.
I think that's well deep enough, and I don't know that I would change that.
A 90° v-bit would probably cut about half that depth...
...so a little more than 1/16 of an inch.
I'm going to go with the .0997 that this has cut to.
That's the maximum depth it's cut to in this entire carve.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of some of the basics of bitmap tracing.
Again, starting out with a decent image...
...and for the first few carves a fairly simple image like this...
...will help you get your feet wet and help you better decide for yourself...
...how many little details you want in your carving...
...versus how many details... whoa...
That was not good...
[laugh...]
...versus how many details you want...
Okay, well that's close...
As I was saying, it'll help you decide how many details you actually want within the drawing...
...versus how many details will either be deleted, lost in machining, or lost through sanding.
So, again, start simple.
Don't over complicate it.
Remember to keep a sense of perspective...
...especially when you're zooming in and dealing with a lot of little details in the drawing that you may or may not need.
And just keep trying. Keep plugging away at it.
Hopefully this gives you a sense of what's involved in it.
In subsequent videos, I will be getting into more complex drawings...
...working with color images, and getting a little deeper into Node Editing...
...and all the capabilities that you have within the Node Editing Mode...
...especially when it comes to bitmap tracing.
So I hope you got something out of this video.
If you did, please give me a thumbs up down below.
And if you'd like to follow along with my further adventures in CNC...
...or the Vectric software...
...please consider subscribing to my channel.
But whether you subscribe to my channel or not...
...as usual, I'd like to thank you very much for taking the time to watch this video.
Y'all take care.
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