I would suggest using ball-nosed tooling and texture toolpaths for this.
Grab a fish from somewhere — the Elements Library has a couple:
scaling it down to a reasonable size:
we get a design which has a mix of closed (indicated by being black) and open (indicated by being magenta)
which wants an assortment of toolpaths.
First, the open geometry is only suited to being cut w/ a No-offset Contour toolpath:
Select a tool which matches the scale of the design you are working on:
and verify it with the 3D preview:
which seems a bit heavy, so we switch to something smaller:
and adjust the Depth to match the radius of the smaller tool to get:
which seems reasonable.
There are some small details which really can’t be cut save as a V carving — use a tool which is as acute as necessary to cut as deeply as one wishes:
(note that there is one outline which we will want to add to the above contour)
but perhaps a more acute tool would be better:
and maybe we should go smaller with the ball-nose so as to better match…
which just leaves the surround.
Draw in a rectangle:
and reduce it a bit:
and we then decide to ensure that the fish outline is cut consistently with the rest of the design so we select the outlined elements:
and add the fish outline itself:
and modify the outline cut to match:
which now previews as:
Next we cut around things:
with one size ball-nosed tool:
which previews as:
We then offset the fish by the radius of the ball-nosed tool:
and use that and a smaller ball-nosed tool to cut a texture which starts at the bottom of the previous pocket and cuts a bit deeper:
which all previews as:
and should afford a good mix of plain uncut areas which won’t burn much, and textured areas which will burn.
Attached as a v7 file:
fish_v7.c2d (372 KB)
