Carbide Create re-drawing

WillAdams · August 16, 2019, 12:34am

If one only has a pixel image:

then one has three options:

auto-tracing — EDIT: Carbide Create has since gained this feature: Carbide Create - Image Tracing and there is a tutorial on this: Inkscape tutorial: Tracing bitmaps | Inkscape
using the pixel image using a tool such as MeshCAM or Carbide Create Pro’s texture feature
re-drawing — this is a tutorial on this:

Begin by going to Job Setup and setting the Stock Size and importing the image onto the background:

WillAdams · August 16, 2019, 12:50am

Switch to the Design tab and select the Curve tool and click at each place you need points. For folks not familiar w/ Bézier curves these are:

points of inflection
extrema at the north/south, east/west points
usually off-curve nodes should be roughly one-third of the way towards the center of the curve — 30% is the specific number usually cited, hence terming this the “Rule of 30”.

and see: Let's draw an "ellipse" with new users — note that you may want to turn off View | Snap to grid (it can also help to turn it on to ensure that things are symmetrical/aligned).

If you wish, you can click-drag to create curves:

Then, zoom in on each section and adjust the curves and nodes to get things to align nicely.

WillAdams · August 16, 2019, 12:57am

You can right-click on a node and turn on “Toggle Smooth” from the contextual menu:

which will instantiate off-curve nodes:

which may then be dragged into position:

If nodes are smooth, then the placement of off-curve nodes is not just smooth (in-line with the on-curve node), but also symmetrical where the off-curve nodes are equi-distant from the on-curve node. To adjust this, click-hold-drag on the off-curve node, press ALT, and drag it to where you wish it to be:

Repeat this process working around all the curves:

WillAdams · August 16, 2019, 1:22am

Zoom in on a section and then draw in a bit of geometry to measure the thickness of things:

then delete the drawn piece and select the geometry and inset the path by an appropriate dimension:

and repeat:

Then draw in additional geometry:

Note that since this is symmetrical you can duplicate and flip geometry and reposition it rather than drawing elements twice.

Select the inner geometry and one of the new drawn elements and punch the latter out using Boolean subtraction:

Note that the element which you wish to punch through should have a solid selection, and the element which you are punching with should have a dashed appearance:

resulting in:

repeat until you arrive at:

Note that if you get the selection wrong you can just undo, which will reverse the selection, then redo the Boolean operation.

WillAdams · August 16, 2019, 1:31am

For the text, we need Helvetica bold, so we go to Help | About and open the data directory, then navigate to:

and paste in the font in question. If Carbide Create is still running, quit (saving if need be) and restart.

Then, set each letter individually and drag into position and rotate as needed:

WillAdams · August 16, 2019, 1:50am

With a bit of patience you arrive at:

SVG (zipped): rangertab.zip (17.7 KB)

rangertab.c2d (706.4 KB)

Note that the file was created in Carbide Create 429: https://carbide3d.com/carbidecreate/unstable/

StephenCox · November 12, 2022, 9:21pm

Guess this was an old post