Carbide Create designs not pocketing

Software Carbide Create
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Hi there

I’m designing a silhouette dragon in carbide create, the dragon is suppose to be a pocket cut into oak, starting with the head I thought I would try a quick toolpath sim to see how well defined the dragons head looked.

Only, I can’t seem to get CC to pocket any of my designs when setting the toolpaths, could anyone tell me where I’m going wrong here? or if it can even be done in Carbide Create.

Hope someone can help, many thanks. Kris

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dragon 1.png1920×1080 92.7 KB

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You probably aren’t closing the toolpath in Carbide Create — what colour is the path when it’s not selected?

There doesn’t seem to be a way to do this in Carbide Create — might be possible to edit the text of the file outside of Carbide Create — post it?

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dragon 2.png1920×1080 67 KB

Firstly thank you for the help, please find attached the unselected colour of the object.

How does one ‘close the toolpath’?

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I have joined the lines on other projects, but the option to do so with this design doesn’t seem to be available in the left menu bar.

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In Carbide Create unselected open paths are magenta, unselected closed paths are black.

To close a path it’s easiest to click on the beginning point while creating it — while there is a way in the interface to close it after the fact, I find it tricky to manage.

The file format looks pretty simple, and it ought to be straight-forward to draw up some samples, compare them and then figure out how to edit a file such as yours to close it — if you’ll post it, I’ll take a look at it during my lunch break.

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I had this same issue when drawing a bear (Will and another guys helped me a ton!). Finally downloaded Inkscape (it’s free) to finish the drawing. You can save as an .svg file from Inkscape and open in Carbide Create. After that, my project was more cooperative.

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Wow I really appreciate that Will but I haven’t finished the whole dragon yet! lol I’ll post it when it’s finished though.

What software do you recommend for joining the lines? as I can’t keep asking you every time I do a design :smile: thanks again for the help. Kris

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Thank you Joseph I’ll take a look at that.

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I think the best tools to start with drawing in are:

  • Serif’s Affinity Designer — Mac/Windows, commercial, but quite affordable
  • Cenon — this is a CAD/CAM app which has made the leap to opensource drawing tool — runs on Mac OS X or Linux
  • Inkscape — opensource, free, runs on pretty much anything (though it’s not nice as an X Window app in Mac OS X — really wish GNUstep had more traction)

Save an SVG from any of those (might have to wash Cenon into a PDF, then through Inkscape) and it should import fine into Carbide Create, just follow the following rules:

  • view in outline mode — (View | Display Mode | Outline for Inkscape) — that will show you the geometry which Carbide Create will see
  • save an archival copy before converting type to paths, and if need be, save as a PDF to convert any cloned objects to actual paths (there should be options for doing this in the applications)
  • ensure that the file which you send to Carbide Create is nothing but paths/a single composite path with correct winding (outermost path is counter-clockwise, next is clockwise and properly alternating)
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You mention using Affinity Designer to create input for Carbide Create. Affinity Designer is my favorite vector drawing tool, but I can not get it to work with Carbide Create. The best I have been able to do is export to SVG, then open the SVG in Inkscape, re-scale the drawing, and re-save. This is not the best workflow, as the re-scaling is sort of “eyeballing” it, which is pretty much guaranteed to not give me accurate dimensions. Plus, Inkscape runs pretty slow under OSX, so it’s a bit tedious.

Any thoughts on how to directly import to Carbide Create from Affinity Designer OSX? Thanks!

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Please send an Affinity Designer file in to support@carbide3d.com and we’ll add it to the test suite.

You should be able to get accurate scaling by including a surrounding rectangle of known dimension, then, on import into Carbide Create selecting everything and scaling to get back to the original size.

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Wow, that was a fast response! Ok, I’ll create an SVG exported from Affinity Designer and send it in!
I’m evaluating several desktop CNC routers right now, and the toolchain is important to me. Thanks!

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I did some poking around in the SVG file generated by Affinity Designer’s export function. I found that the output SVG “width” and “height” attributes were set to “100%”. Looking at the SVG that is output by Inkscape, these are set to absolute dimensions. As an experiment, I tried editing the SVG file from Affinity Designer, and changing the height and width to

<svg width="8.5in" height="11.0in">,

and, Voila! My file imported into Carbide Create 3D, scaled correctly! Note that I had set my Affinity Designer canvas to 8.5x11 in, so this matched the size of the canvas.

I should probably try a few more files just to be sure this works the way I think it does, but it looks like this may be the answer.

Edit: Yup, that seems to do the trick!

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