New to CNC Machining

21

Sure, I don’t mind.

When I get a little time, I’ll try and put together a video.

The trick is to get the gradient “expanded” into separate vectors and not just 1 vector with multiple shades in it.

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@sketch42 Awesome, thank you because I have no idea how to do that, I probably did the latter.

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Here is a walk through video of what to do in Illustrator.

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I’m right there with you. New to cnc and got my xcarve a week ago. I’ve been making a bunch of signs using easel and have been reading everything I can about 3d carving. This is the first time any of it made sense and I can’t wait to play with grey scales in easel!

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After a while it all starts to gel in your mind then becomes clear and make almost perfect sense…

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wish it would jell already…why do fonts not carve instead easel puts holes in the wood?

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I would most certainly spend some hours learning OnShape if I was you @RyanBell - it is a fantastic CAD especially when you consider it is totally free :slight_smile: Good for 2.5D (export faces as DXF) or 3D (export as STL). I have used Sketchup for many years now but recently switched to OnShape - the key here is parametric drawing, you can adjust your measures on the way. Things that took hours to create in Sketchup takes minutes in OnShape.

For CAM I recently bought Estlcam - just starting to learn the CAM but it is really great with a lot of features. @ChristianKnull also frequently updates the software with new stuff. It is much more feature rich than Easel - and it is easy to switch from one to another (you can restore to grbl settings in the setup of Estlcam).

Good luck carving!

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Hello sketch42.

Thank you for this information to help much. In my case, I just tried to draw the rectangle as vectorized on video. If I expand gradient to 255 objects, my google chrome browser crash every time, without the horse, just rectangle … If I expand gradient to 50 objects, it’s ok. What can be the problem? The graphics card? My PC has a processor 8 core clocked at 3.6 GHz, 16GB RAM, an SSD of 120 GB of which 47 GB free. Video card, meanwhile, is a NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 with 1GB ddr3 memory. Do you have an idea of the problem? What equipment do you own?

Thank you for your answers.

Cordially.

JB