VCarve Pro versus Carbide Pro ease of use and G Code

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

You don’t need to spend any money to try them both out.

Carbide Create is free with a machine connected to Carbide Motion (and there’s also the unsupported v6 which can be used with pretty much anything).

Vectric has a trial mode which allows experimenting with set files and so forth.

For both programs one needs to select the appropriate post-processor if generating G-code. For Carbide Create, this is Edit | Select Post-processor | Carbide 3D Shapeoko — for Vectric see:

How to set up the BitSetter with Vectric Products

Either edit the post-processor you are using, or get one which supports tool changes: (note that Vectric support has been sharing that file to customers who ask after this) See: Vcarve Pro and Post Processor for further details.

I bought a Vectric license a while back, and updated it a couple of times, then stopped because I was only using it to test files for customers and that got to be rare enough that it just didn’t seem worth it. I used it once myself, for a single project, and while the results were nice, didn’t much like it because it’s a fussy, complex program which way more options and settings than seem needful.

Carbide Create is arguably simple to a fault, but it’s straight-forward, and one can do pretty much any CAM thing one needs to in it, esp. if one springs for a Pro license, but even the bundled version is quite capable. Moreover, one isn’t limited to just what can be done in the program — it will import SVG and DXF files, and one can greatly extend its capabilities either by:

• using a 3rd party vector drawing program to create designs — Inkscape is a free/opensource option for this, Serif’s Affinity Designer is the budget option, folks who can put up w/ it and on-going monthly payments use Adobe Illustrator, and there are a number of other options — I use Macromedia Freehand/MX because I was a beta tester and used Altsys Virtuoso which it was based on back in the day
• use a CAD program to create DXFs to import — this will allow constraint-based sketching and so forth
• use a programming system to create files to import — I use OpenSCAD by way of the graphical programming systems BlockSCAD:

https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/

and OpenSCAD Graph Editor: GitHub - derkork/openscad-graph-editor: OpenSCAD Graph Editor , both of which are front-ends for: https://openscad.org/ — sometimes it’s just easier to do the underlying math to arrive at the requisite geometry.

I’ve written a bit about Carbide Create at:

2D Drawing

and

Toolpaths

What sort of work do you wish to do you with your machine? How do you wish to approach it? In what materials?