I am trying to get an electric guitar body contour, neck and other pockets all imported to CC via DXF from Onshape. I have had great success in the past with this workflow going into Illustrator and cutting on the laser. Unfortunately, my designs seem to always flag initial errors about contour and pockets when I import, and then if I try to get assign tool paths like contour, it pick up multiple parts of the design. I am not sure if there is something I can do to clean this up or if I just need to upgrade to CC Pro? Is it better to do a guitar body with some 3D relief in Pro as a 3D cut, or is a 2D layout still most practical?
I would do it all in 2D. It’s faster & more accurate. Unless there are actual 3D features like a rounded edge where your arm rests.
Pocket paths need closed vectors. Drawings don’t. So this is construction geometry to use to make the vectors you want. And depending on how you will cut it, you may be trimming and joining curves differently.
I’m guessing you will cut out the 5-6 pockets, and then do a profile (contour) cut around the outside.
So you will need 1 contiguous curve around the outside, and a contiguous closed curve for each pocket. Some of the geometry you will need to duplicate to use in more than one boundary.
What are the depths of the neck, pickup, connecting the pickups, electronics & jack pockets?
Whichever pocket is shallower (pickups or the small pocket connecting them) I would cut all 3 pockets together, and possibly add the electronics pocket as well. Cut all those pockets down to the highest level, then cut the remaining pockets to the next level, then cut the deepest pockets individually.
For the neck pocket you can make the boundary come outside the outer profile to the tool overlaps that edge.
It’s just a matter of planning out how you will cut it, and then reassembling the vectors to accommodate your plan.
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I am assuming you are using the DXF export from an Onshape sketch. You can put all the data in a single sketch, then create separate sketches for each target process. The separate Sketches would get the geometry from the original “arrangement” sketch. Create a new sketch on the same plane and use the Project/Convert to duplicate the geometry but maintaining the links to the original geometry.
This way you can also modify the duplicate geometry to satisfy the CAM requirements
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I guess I just don’t understand why I can use this method so effortlessly and successfully with the workflow to my laser, but when I use the same file here, I have to redo a lot of the vectors you are saying. The whole point of dialing it in while in Onshape is so I can just export the whole thing and assign tooling as needed. I do have needs for 3D, and I am a little reluctant to purchase CC pro, as there are not many resources on getting 3D cuts for guitars with that software other than a few forums.
Anyone have tutorials that show how to set up and redo the vectors. I’m about done with CC, just does not seem to pickup the workflow I need. We are already done prototyping these same files on the laser. Frustrating that so much has to be done to pick the same the lines up from the same dxf in CC.
I understand that it is not filling your needs right now. For the price, both the Free and PRO, they are tools that you can use to get what you need. There are plenty of people here that will help with problems you might encounter.
Other companies offer products at a significant price difference that might work better for your needs. If that works for you, go for it.
Good luck
Are you cutting out the entire guitar body, pockets & outer profile on the laser?
Or are you just scribing the outlines on the surface?
Will your laser software allow the selection of unjoined curves to do a pocket or bounded area type of path? Like a engraving path where it fills in the area bounded by the curves?
I use NX, and it will ‘join’ individual curves into a boundary in a CAM operation. CC doesn’t do this.
Can you join curves in Onshape? If you know you are going to pocket an area, create a contiguous curve around that area in Onshape, and then the curve should export to dxf then import to CC correctly.
I wrote a bit about this at:
which may help (or further confuse things)
Can you share the onshape project and/or the resultant dxf?
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You can create a composite curve from sketch entities, but you can’t export it independently.
You can make a solid from the sketch or composite curve and export the bounded face as a DXF. That face selection shows you what is joined together.
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