I am in the process of designing a tv/monitor stand. decided to get fancy and put two drawers in it, then I decided to be super fancy and gonna try to CNC a pattern into the drawer fronts and then use epoxy to fill. So this is what I came up with.
drew everything out in CC, (front frame, back panel, all the corners to make the edges rounded…) and am pretty sure it will all work but I had an extremely difficult time with the drawer fronts. I drew out the pattern by constructing an equilateral triangle. copy and pasted 6 of them together and used the union function to get a “zig-zag” then copied that twice and rotated to get “whatever the heck three zig-zags together would be called”. I set that as a group and used it as the master and tiled them together until I had enough to cover my drawer front which I also made a group.
This is where the problems started. I am not sure what it is called but I was trying to limit the pattern to only exist within the bounds of the drawer front. I know the standard process would probably be to just cut beyond the edges of the drawer face and then cut the drawer face out, but I trying to conserve material and squeeze as much into one sheet as possible. The union of the pattern and drawer front is obviously not what I wanted. I thought the intersection is what I wanted but I guess because it recognizes the pattern as 93 individual shapes I don’t get the intersection as an option??? The subtraction was close but basically did the opposite of what I wanted and changing the order of the selection didn’t help either.
In the end, I was able to get what I wanted by going around and individually editing all of the nodes on the exterior pieces. The actual workpiece I am making is a much tighter pattern so it took a while, but it worked. So how should I have actually done this? is there an easier way than what I did or was that the only option? Could I have constructed the pattern differently somehow to make it easier?
I am sure learning fusion is the real answer but that is something I will have to do once summer break arrives.
Hello, see what you mean in CC… however i took the CC file outside in a Cadd program and trimmed the the un-needed vectors, then import back into CC… just one way i would suppose…
@altador Which cad software did you use? Like I said I have access fusion for free since I am an educator, I just get lost as it doesn’t work anywhere near the same as SketchUp which is what I am super comfortable with. Guess I need to look into ways to convert SketchUp files to svgs or something… or quit trying to shortcut it and learn how to use actual cad software.
thanks @WillAdams this makes soooo much sense. didn’t even cross my mind to ungroup the pattern pieces and intersect with a copy of the border. A little involved but way easier and more accurate than what I ended up resorting to. this forum is amazing, hopefully this thing all comes out the way it is supposed to.
i use ActCad, very similar command structure to AutoCad, for a much more reasonable price. Im not to familiar with Sketchup, but some learning curve with all new programs i guess, but i find it helps to have other tools in the toolbox to work with CC
@Gerry yes I know the process of making the pattern is called a tesselation, we make them every year in the math class I teach. I more so meant I didn’t know what to call the “trimming” I wanted to do. Like I said the boolean subtraction was the opposite of what I wanted so I was thinking the inverse of a boolean subtraction but that didn’t really make sense either. I guess ultimately a boolean intersection is what I wanted. I believe CC doesn’t like it because it is more than one vector path grouped together but still considered individual paths. Although now that I am typing this out, I wonder if I export the tesselation as an SVG if there is a way to open it in a separate program like inscape and combine all paths into just one. Then I might be able to select the tesselation and the border and use the intersection to do what I want.
That might also cut down on cut time by eliminating a good portion of the overlapping paths. Anyone out there (@WillAdams cough cough) familiar enough to know if this is an option.
At this time there isn’t an automatic way to have the program manage overlapping toolpaths — you have to do Boolean operations to arrive at the geometry needed for each layer.
