VCarve Repeating Scaleable Patterns

[BallardBuilt]

Hi Everyone,
I am very new to VCarve and come from the world of Adobe and graphic design. I am very comfortable with vectors and have been able to bring in some patterns that I drew in Adobe Illustrator as DXF files which is great. The carpenter I am working with gets requests often for things like a Barn door with a herringbone pattern in it. I am wondering if there is a way to save these as patterns that can 'fill' the dimensions even if they change? Doable in Adobe to fill whatever space with a vector pattern, and also scale the pattern smaller or larger.

I have brought the vectors in and 'trimmed' the outside of the door to get that excess gone and it seems to work, but seems inefficient that if I started with a new dimension door I would have to do that all over again?

I looked into arrays but it doesn't quite seem to be what I need....

Appreciate any thoughts!
Kerry

[Adrian]

Welcome.

I do that a fair bit and what I have is a library of patterns scaled to the largest size I work with which is 8'x4'. When I want to use them I drag the outer design (the door in your example) into the 2D window and then drag the pattern in it. I have libraries setup in the Clipart tab to allow that but you can drag from a Windows explorer window as well. Select both and use the Center Align tool to line them up followed by the Trim Selected Objects tool set to Clear outside boundary.

Takes a couple of seconds to do but obviously only works if the individual elements of the pattern stay the same size. If the pattern needs to grow or shrink then you would need to add a Scale operation in there as well.

You can also generate fill patterns with the Create Vector Texture tool or with the Texture toolpath itself but I tend to use those more for abstract patterns rather than rigid geometric ones.

[BallardBuilt]

Super helpful Adrian. I will give that a shot.

I investigated the Texture tool but seemed, as you said, that those were more for abstract waves, etc. not for something like I'm doing.

Might be back to you as I fumble along!

Thanks again!