Are there any plans to:
- Expand the grid area into -X & -Y
- Add the ability to change the zero of the Material Dimensions so that my workpiece renders properly
- Add the ability to move the Work Zero rather than move the art relative to a fixed Work Zero
Explanations:
-
Expand the Grid area into -X & -Y: A big limitation on my work is that the sliders for Up/Down and Left/Right are only scaled to the extent of the machine, so I can only zoom in on details within the machine range of 0,0 to 11.5,11.5. Expanding the grid area into -X,-Y would presumably fix this. This would also fix an less important issue which is that I’m working 25% on white space, and 75% on blue space, which just gets a bit annoying.
-
Change the zero of the Material Dimensions: Easel only renders a preview based on a workpiece located at 0,0 on the grid. The workpiece dimensions can excede the machine table dimensions, but only in +X & +Y.
If I move my art into the -X,-Y realm, the machine carves fine, and doesn’t care that the art is outside the visual area. But the rendering is never correct so I have to do all of my work in +X,+Y, then move the art just prior carving.
If I want to make changes (in this project I changed family names and spacing) I need to move the art back to +X,+Y to see if I like the changes. Then carefully realign all the art back to the new Work Zero. That’s a lot of extra steps, and introduces opportunities to forget steps or make mistakes that I don’t realize until the carving starts. This is made worse with the slider limitations I mentioned earlier.
- Add the ability to move the Work Zero relative to the art: The ability to move the Work Zero would just be fantastic as it would allow users to work in Visual Space. I think this would cut down on the number of setup errors and speed up the learning curve. If I look at my piece of plywood, and say I want to start cutting around (here), then the Work Zero could be moved to the correct point, and then the spindle could be moved to the correct point as well. This makes it easier to work on irregularly shaped parts as well as utilize more of the waste board rather than just always carving relative to Left, Front corner.