hello all, new easel and new cnc user here. would like to say thanks to all of you for posting the things you do. i’ve learned a lot and am getting better and having a blast using my x carve.
i was wondering if anyone can tell me if there is a link or a place to find the information about easel home screen. in particularly the edit tab. trying to figure out what the “send to back/backwards” “bring to front/forward”. what do these tabs do? how do you use them? i’ve seen some videos online, but i just dont get it. if anyone has a link or cheat sheet that explains the use they could share, it would be greatly appreciated.
Just like a modern operating system has windows that have a Z-Order (depth order; i.e. which one is on top of the other), Easel also has this for each shape/group of shapes. This can be helpful in quite a few situations.
For instance, this is an image of a project that I have been working on. Sometimes during the designing process, I want to add an additional shape somewhere at a deeper depth than other objects that will be above it. I can simply create the new shape and “Send backwards” until I get it between the two shapes that it needs to be to create the overall cut profile that I am after.
The piece that I am pointing to could have been created last out of all of the other objects and just moved into the proper place in the objects’ Z-Order. The entire track actually goes up under that grill section.
I think Brandon did a great job of explaining it!!
I happened to put together a super short video a week back explaining a different function to someone else and the video also happens to talk about the layering and moving forward and backwards to use the feature I was showing off, I figured I’ll include it to show another reason one might need to adjust the layering… Quick Tip - Layering and a Eraser type trick in Easel - (unlisted) - YouTube
That said, I agree with Brandon that PawPaw has some excellent tutorials, I scrolled through to check for one about layering and even the ones I thought he talked about the function I couldn’t find one that shows adjusting the layers, he usually just designs in the correct order from bottom to top, which puts the layers in the correct order already… I might just have to make a longer, better video delving into layering a bit
