Carbide Create how to

I am creating a waste board design in Carbide Create for the t-nut holes. For example, I have 100 circles and another 100 within the first 100 circles or a circle inside a circle, inner/outter.

In the Tool Path menu, I want to set a tool path for the inner circles. I select the first inner circle then hold the shift key (windows 10) and continue to select the remaining 99 inner circles.

Heres the problem. If I accidently missed targeting 1 inner circle, I lose ALL the selected circles and have to start over.

Is there a better method to this madness?

Thanks, fustrated and carpal tunneled.

Yes this is a real pain…and incredibly frustrating. I had the same issues recently and no way round it that I could find.

VCarve Desktop has a function to automatically select all circles… or even all circles of a certain size… which would be great in CC…

However it could be improved enormously in Carbide Create by making it a double click on white space to clear all selections rather than a single click which is SO easy to accidentally do when trying to select many features like that.

perhaps @robgrz could comment and hopefully make this simple change in future versions of CC ?

Can you not drag-select to make the selection?

Usually for things like this I find it more efficient to select everything, then shift-click to remove unwanted things from the selection.

I’ve put in a feature request for this.

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In my case, I could not drag and select because it would select many other features that were unwanted.

Indeed, I had hoped to do multiple drag and selects in different areas, still holding down shift… but as soon as you start the 2nd drag all previously selected features become unselected… sigh

Were there more than 100 items? If not, wouldn’t it be more efficient to shift-click and remove them from the selection?

Two other techniques:

  • group small subsets, then put the groups together
  • temporarily shift items out of the way by selecting them and changing there location by the size of the graphic rounded up to an easy to change number
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Will, reasonable suggestions as always… but not really workable in my opinion… because if you just oh so slightly miss a feature to select or deselected something… the whole lot of selections disappear… hence my suggestion of a double click rather than single to clear selections

Im just going to eat… but I will share a simple design in a little while so you can see what the issue is and how frustrating it can be

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That’s why I put in the suggestion to retain the selection when shift-clicking on an empty area (which is how all other vector drawing programs behave).

@WillAdams Yes - I am very pleased you put in that suggestion!

I attach a simple file from which I have removed all toolpaths that I had eventually laboriously created.

The challenge is to select all 45 thru holes and apply one toolpath, then select all 45 counterbores wirh a different toolpath. If anyone can do it in a reasonably short time without missing a shift-clicked vector and having to start again from scratch - then you are way better than me - or you have found a better way!

selection_issues.c2d (354.4 KB)

Another suggestion that would be most useful - is :

When copying a selection of multiple objects (and/or grouped objects) the copy retains all toolpaths already assigned to them and also the groupings if there are any.) In my experience this is the most often desired case. If CC behaved like that I could have achieved what I wanted probably at least 10-20 times quicker - and used it in many other designs that I create !

If you:

  • shift-click to select all the shapes of the clamps
  • drag select to select all the outer circles in a straight line plus the group of the shapes of the clamps
  • shift-click on the clamps to remove them from the selection
  • group

You can build up a set of groups of only the outer circles pretty quickly, then it’s just a matter of shift clicking and grouping them:

then do a drag-select of everything, shift-click on the shapes and the outer circles group:

and group again and you have 3 groups

Yes that is pretty much how I did it in the end, but Initially I tried the simple obvious select-shift-click approach till I found how frustrating it was - just like @GIban671 noted above.

My point is that this sort of workaround approach is non-intuitive for most users… and could be so much easier and obvious with a little programming change to bring CC in line with other similar drawing applications - I know you appreciate this. It is just a question of getting Carbide3D programmers on board too!

Of course another way of doing it would be to place the holes on one drawing layer and the counter bores on another layer… if only CC had layers…!

Thanks … I am not alone. But beyond fustrations was the fowl language associated with the dreaded shift click white space and hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.

CC are you listening …

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