My wife bought me a VCarve Desktop for Christmas. I took a project that I had done some time ago in CC (box with horse relief on lid) and replicated that in VCarve.
My first issue is that vectors exported from CC come into VCarve scaled up slightly. I didn’t see any options on either the export or the import to set DPI.
The second issue is that the total cut time estimate in VCarve is something like 4 times longer than CC. I have tried to replicate the parameters as closely as possible but I feel like I am doing something wrong. I know that the estimate in CC is typically lower than CM by 30% or so but not off this much.
So, other than watching the video referenced, stop and think about what the Vectric software is trying to do: guess how well your particular machine will cut out a toolpath. It can’t possibly be “accurate” right out of the box.
There’s always been a scaling factor that you adjust (read the user instructions) for your particular setup. As you cut (or make some test cuts) keep track of the times calculated vs. the actual time cut. Then you can adjust the scaling to get the times to match closer.
It has always worked for me. My calculated estimates are really only used to adjust the way I design my toolpaths. I’m always trying to make them quicker. For that you only need an estimate.
My Vectric andy CArbide motion estimates never even agree. The only reason I even look at them is to be alerted if I did something stupid. And that happens.
I’ve run into the same issue with SVGs exported from CC coming in a bit large (10" imports as 10.667"). I would love a direct solution, but for now I place a known size rectangle around the image before SVG export, then scale the imported image to get the box back to size.
The issue is a pain and both CC and Vectric contribute to the issue. CC does not specify dimensions just uses the basic pixel for units. Vectric looks for the file to describe units and when it does not find them defaults to 90 ppi where CC uses the much more common 96 ppi.
I did a small test and calculated real runtimes vs the estimate and determined I should set the scale to 1.1 which dropped estimated time in my real project quite a bit. I also tweaked the rapid Z gaps.
The time was still significantly slower than CC so I looked more closely at the stepovers and feedrate. In CC I had the stepover about 9% but in VCarve it was 3%. Changing that made a huge difference of course. All those piled on dropped the time estimates from 7.5hrs to 2 which is more reasonable.
There are so many ways to change the cutting time for a particular project. Sometimes one can add a toolpath and reduce the cutting time! On some wood and with certain fonts, I will add a second/duplicate vcarve toolpath, but move the Z-zero down 0.002". This is faster than hand cleaning all the fuzzies. So time is saved in an overall manner.
You just have to think about what you are cutting and find the best tool.
