I’m carving an image of a body of water, the Chesapeake Bay. There is a large main area and then multiple small rivers etc.
The challenge is that I need to use a 1/4 bit for the large area and then an 1/8 or 1/16 in the smaller rivers.
Ive doing this on an XCarve in Easel which will first do a roughing pass and then come home and allow me to change the bit for the detail pass. I don’t need to re zero in between.
I see in 3.16 of Create there are grouped tool paths. Will this do the same thing?
What you want is known as “Rest” machining — unfortunately, Carbide Create won’t do that automatically — what you can do is use offset paths and Boolean operations to define the uncut regions and manually assign toolpaths — this is risky though, since an error can easily snap a small endmill.
Most commercial CAM packages support this sort of thing, MeshCAM for 3D, I believe Vectric Vcarve for 2.5D.
I read the post a bit differently at first as being more about exporting the toolpaths. In case that’s more on point, you can disable all but the paths you want for the 1/4" end mill and save gcode, then disable the 1/4" and enable the others, and save that as a separate gcode file. Here’s a link: http://docs.carbide3d.com/tutorials/tool-change/
Thanks guys, what I was hoping is that the Shapeoko would work like the X Carve. I’m looking to buy one and would prefer the Shapeoko but this is the main application that I have. in XCarve you lay out your job and you can choose two different bits to use. It will carve what it can with the larger rough bit and then go back and finish with the detail. I’ll read the tutorial you linked to see if it’s the same or similar but it doesn’t sound like it’s what I need.
Not sure if you’re familiar with how Easel works, but once I have the image of the bay ready to cut and tell it what bits to use for each cut it just does it. Once it’s done the roughing it returns home and allows me to change the bit for the detail - would this be exactly the same on the SP3 if I create the gcode in Easel?