Reducing un-needed pecking on V-Carve Toolpaths?

[Mark Bolton]

Hello all,
We run quite a few v-carve cutouts of various bitmap traces. These have large-ish open areas that would normally be cleared with a large area clearance tool (endmill) but what we opt to do to save time is I put in a fake endmill with a diameter of like .01" and select it as the clearance tool trying to fool V Carve into just dealing with the smallest of areas with the Vbit. The large pieces just fly up the dust collector when cut free. There is however still a lot of small pecking and air cutting. I dont want to sacrifice detail in these pieces but would love to get the Vcarve toolpath to a point where it almost behaved like a profile tool path but of course sharpens up all the corners/points like a VCarve toolpath.

Any input or ideas? I havent tried anything smaller than a .01 endmill. Wondering about trying a .005 or even an .001 but thought the wizards may steer us clear.

Thanks,
Mark

[highpockets]

Mark,
If you can justify Aspire look at "Rest Machining", I think this will do what you're looking for.

[Rcnewcomb]

Rest machining is just for 3D toolpaths, not V-Carve.

[highpockets]

Whoops!!!

[4DThinker]

This won't eliminate the number of times the bit lifts up, but you can reduce your Clearance Z and Plunge Z to a small value (like .005) so the time in the air is cut to a minimum. Then speed up the plunge speed of the bit you are using for a little more time saving.

4D

[Paul Z]

When the software tries to trace a bitmap, it will often create "vectors" with hundreds to thousands of nodes. If you smooth these vectors using the fit curves function, it will reduce the number of nodes and create better behaved "vectors". The fit curves tolerance can be as little as 0.005" and still provide a drastic improvement.

Paul Z

[Mark Bolton]

Sorry for the late response and thanks to all for the input.

We will try changing the Z limits on the next run and see what happens. I always fit Bezier's to all the vectors because there is most always a lot of node editing and fussing after the initial fit from the bitmap trace. I try to get the vectors as clean as possible (eliminate every last un-needed node I can) prior to creating toolpaths. There always seems to be a lot of areas where the toolpath dwell's down clearing a basically a very small ramped-sort-of plunge. Then comes back and sweeps the profile quickly. We have tried setting the Vcarve pass depth to run be able to run the entire thing in a single pass but of course thats not really how Vcarving works so it always goes back to sharpen up points and so on.

We will see if more tweaking speeds it up. We've got it pretty fast now but always trying to think of ways to speed it up more lol.

Again, thanks so much for the input. Much appreciated.

[Phil]

I've had this problem with a few projects. Sometimes the Bitmap Trace produces many very small, almost insignificant closed vectors. It would be very helpful if there was a gadget that could locate and delete vectors of a specified size. I traced a high resolution image of a tree and there were hundreds of tiny closed vectors that needed to be eliminated. Doing that manually was very time consuming. If I knew how to write a gadget I would write one to eliminate tiny closed vectors.

Phil

[Mark Bolton]

I know exactly what your talking about Phil. Often times the bitmap trace will create hundreds of little squares or rectangles trying to pickup fine detail. One thing you can do to greatly reduce them is to up the noise slider. That will often times get rid of the vast majority of them but I agree it would be a cool gadget to be able to select all closed vectors below a given size threshold. This way you could keep the noise slider down to capture finer detail but more easily cleanup any errant noise.

Most of the Vcarving we are doing as of late is fairly straight forward so we generally run the noise slider at full.

Thanks
Mark

[Adrian]

These days I manually trace everything rather than using auto traces. Even with complex bitmaps it's by far the best way of doing it and once you've done a few it's amazing how quickly it can be done. It's rare a customer supplies a bitmap that is remotely good enough for tracing and the time spent cleaning up a trace is often the same or more than doing it by hand in the first place.

[martin54]

I couldn't agree more with what Adrian has said, yes it does take a bit of time to get use to manually tracing/drawing artwork but once you get the hang of it then it is often far quicker than trying to auto trace something & then clean it up
You can also decide exactly what level of detail you want & easily leave out the stuff you don't want

[Phil]

My preference is also manual trace, the results are better. However some image are too complex to trace manually. This sign is a good example. This one where the Bitmap Trace produce hundreds of vectors.

[Adrian]

My preference is also manual trace, the results are better. However some image are too complex to trace manually. This sign is a good example. This one where the Bitmap Trace produce hundreds of vectors.

For something like that I would use one of the vector library services to get a ready made tree vector or use a single colour silhouette of one to auto trace. A picture with that many small sectors is never going to trace properly. I have a huge library of vectors and silhouettes I've purchased over the years for just that purpose.

[Phil]

The original hi res image was provided by the client who is a professional photographer. Clean up was time consuming on my part but the gentleman was satisfied with the result and I was satisfied with my commission. However, this was a unique situation.

Phil

[Kayvon]

it would be a cool gadget to be able to select all closed vectors below a given size threshold

That's a great suggestion for a gadget. And it wouldn't be that hard to create, either.
Next time I'm stuck removing small vectors, I may just write it up.