Any Chance of Full-Color Simulation in Carbide Create?

Software Carbide Create
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Just wondering if there’s any chance Carbide Create might eventually offer full-color simulations.

VCarve Pro has the ability to assign colors and preview a project that way, which is really useful for sign work. I much prefer working in Carbide Create, though, so I’d love to see something similar added at some point.

Being able to see the carved areas, raised lettering, backgrounds, etc. in their actual planned colors would make the simulation a lot more useful for visualizing the finished sign for customers before cutting. All I can offer them now is a Canva mockup.

Anyone know if this has ever been discussed or is on the radar?

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It was previously asked for:

and is already in the Feature Request area.

Big questions are how to implement the UI, and whether or no enough folks are interested in/would use such a feature.

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Thanks Will. I kind of figured. I rarely use the forums so wasn’t quite sure how to find or where to post the question. Thanks again!

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It’s on the radar, but it’s largely been limited by the current 3D renderer, and questions about the best user interface for assigning colors.

We’re currently changing out the 3D rendering system for Carbide Create, and that should give us a lot more flexibility than the current system.

The user interface is still an open question.

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I think AI should help get this moving in the right direction. :wink:

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One use case is mock-ups. On many jobs, I’ll come up with a design & need to show it to the customer in as close to it’s final form what it will look like.

That in mind, I’m thinking assigning colors/textures per toolpath would be very handy & reduce a lot of 3rd party image editing.

NX by default cycles through (a dozen?) colors in simulation/verification either per toolpath or per tool to help see a contrast between what each operation is removing.

Honestly, just some better textures & lighting, contrast between layers, would be a huge improvement.

Curious, is the 3D representation of the part in simulation a faceted body, or a 3D pixel (voxel) map? I’m guessing the latter (for both simulation & model viewing).

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It’s a heightmap that’s converted to triangles. That might change with the new renderer, though. We were trying to keep it very simple before, to keep GPU cleverness to a bare minimum.

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