How to change 3D text (even in VCarve)
Answering student questions on how to remove 3D text or objects from an imported 3D model and then add text back into the 3D model. This lesson applies to Vectric VCarve and Aspire.
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Video Transcript:
Is there a way to remove or flatten out elements in an STL you want to take out or replace, for example, a gray stl file, but you want to change the language of the piece to English or other. So yeah, this is like if you have a model which you actually have an example here, let's say you downloaded this stl file from online, but you wanted to change the text
on this model and you'll see you could do something like this where you remove the text and now you have the ability to add your own text. So I'm going to show you how that's done. And this can be done in Vcarve or Aspire. So that's another great thing. First off, this is how the model started when I imported it,and this was a purchase file from online
and already had the text in place. And then in the 2D view, what I had to do is isolate the area as with the text. So basically I just drew these shapes around the areas and it doesn't have to be super clean lines like I did here. You can draw like a rough sketch around these. All what I did was created a circle offset of the circle twice and then created lines here to box it off. And I could show you how I did that for this example. But you can just use the freehand draw tool if you want it to and just freehand vector around. There just has to be a closed vector around your text. Another tip is this only this method I'm about to show you only really works if it's a flat area. If it's on a curved area, I will show you how to do that as well. It's a little bit different technique, but the flat area is the easier technique that I'll show you. So I am going to recreate this or hide this layer or add a new layer and I will show you how I created the boxes around the text. So first thing is you could either select your model and go to the modeling tab and click create vector boundary that will create a boundary around the outside of the model. Or if this in this case, since it's a circle, you could just use
the draw circle tool and created your own custom circle. It doesn't matter. Either way is fine. The only thing I like about doing a custom
circle is you see the vector boundary will add a bunch of crazy nodes
because of that pixelation on the edges of the model. So if you were to do that, you could select the shape and see at the bottom here it is a 15.54 inch diameter. You can also go to the scale tool to figure that out
and you can copy that measurement, copy value, and then delete that and then go to the circle tool. Since this is a circle, go to diameter and paste it in here and then just click in the center and click close.
And now if you go to Node edit, you can see that is a much cleaner vector
with only four nodes. So that's generally what I like to do there.
So now we have to offset this line to just so it goes around the edge of our text so we could either just guess the measurement there, we could measure it using the measure tool, or we can scale it directly on the screen just by visualizing it, looking at it here. But you will see once you click away from the model, it fades away. So you might not be able to see the text. So if that happens, you could click on the model and right
click on it and go to object properties. And then what it's fading is
could turn this fading down until you start to see the text and then click close. And now when you do select it, you can still see the text.
So if you want to do the freehand method, which is easier and quicker than measuring and everything, you could select the circle we just created. And you can either scale this one down or make a copy so you can copy it and paste it. And then this pasted one you can hold shift to keep it centered and grab one of the corners and start scaling it down until you see it go right after the border of the sign, but before the text.
So you want to just so it's around the text itself.
And now we'll do that again. We'll paste that original circle and again
and hold shift and start scaling this circle down until it's on the
opposite side of the text. And there we go. Now that circle is on the opposite side of the text, and now we're getting close and you want to make sure look all around it, make sure the text does not cross the lines at any point. And we looks like we're good. There. Okay, So that's the initial shape there. If we didn't have these shapes in the middle here, the spades, then we could just leave it like that. But since we want to keep those shapes there, we're going to have to box these parts of the text off. So to do that, we take the draw line tool. And what I do is just draw a freehand line here, just draw two points and I cross those two circles we just made and click spacebar to stop the line. I cross that by a lot there, just so we can trim that later. With the trim tool,
it's a little bit easier to trim when you have a little bit more of a overhang like that. So I'll do that again up here. Just stopping the line there after the text and then we'll go over here before the text. So we'll need four lines in this case before and after both sections of the text. And once you're done, you can right click to close down the line tool. And now we can use the scissor tool to make sure the box is checked to join all of these together after we trim. And then you're going to trim all these overhangs from those two lines we just created on both sides. So it should look like that. And all you have to do is using the scissor tools. Click on those lines we don't want and all these overhangs we don't want. And there you go. Now click close. And now we have two shapes that are boxed around the text. So that is our first step to isolate the text with a closed sector. And now we we have to remove the text and then we have to fill back in what we remove. The reason for those steps is why it's easier to do this in a flat shape. So go to the duty view. You see, this is what we have now is what we imported. So if we split our view so we can see both at the same time, there's a couple of ways you can remove the text, but the easiest way is by selecting these two shapes and go to the modeling tab. Now you can use the level clipping option So you want to select these two shapes here around the text and then we'll just select the outer circle, right click on the level, go to clipping and click apply. And there we go. Now that removes the text that was in those closed vectors and keeps everything else
that was inside of that outer circle. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it. I could show you how to do that. That's remove the clipping. Whoops. Remove clipping. Now we're back to original. You can see this other method I used was by creating the text to go lower below the surface and then creating a shape to cover them up and merging that on top. So that's another way you can do it. Either way is fine though.
I would probably just stick with that method I showed you already.
That's the easier way. So let's just stick with that by applying that clipping which removes that. So your next step will be to add a brand new level. So you're going to right click on level one and you're going to click insert new level. And the reason you do this is because if you add anything else to level one, it's still going to be clipped in those areas. So we want to fill those areas in. So in order to do that, we need a new level for that to be on. So in this new level, we're going to select it and then you're going to go to the clip art tab and go to the clip art library, then go to domes and dishes and depending on your shape will be depending on which shape you choose here. If you're working with a rectangle, choose rectangle, circle, choose circle, Square, choose square. But basically you're going to choose the flat around circle in this case. So double click on that. I'll put it centered over your project. And then we have to scale this holding shift and one of these corners and you're going to scale it bigger than your project. You want to overhanging the sides and you'll see right away it's not going to look correct. That's okay, because we still have some work to do on this, but that's our first step there. Now we're going to go back to the modeling tab, and right away we have to switch the combined mode of the level. Right now it's set to add and that's why one is on top of the other. So instead, we want these two merge together. So you're going to right click on the new level, go to combine mode and switch it to merge and you'll see that's looking closer to what we want. They're now merging together
instead of adding together. So now we just have to adjust the height of the model by double clicking on that flat round circle. And then where it says shape height, you can raise and lower this and you'll see if we zoom in to the areas we removed right now, it's too low. So we'll raise it up
by dragging the slider and you want to slowly creep up until it removes that edge there. Maybe you just want to go just a little bit more. There we go. Now it looks nice and smooth there. So that's the correct height we want. So now we're going to close that. And now you see we're getting very close. The text is now gone and filled in. But you see now it's
also affecting the outside of the model and the inside of the model.
So any areas that are affected that you don't want filled in you're going to create shapes around those areas. And you'll see I already did that before I created an outer circle like we did before, and I created an inner circle, the same diameter as this inner circle. So now all you have to do, select the circles or whatever shapes you created to trace out the areas that you want to remove that extra. And then you're going to right
click on that new level with the flat round circle on it, and you're going to go to clipping and you're going to click apply and there you go.
And that's all the steps needed. And now what that has done is clipped
the flat round circle outside of those two circles and removed that extra material. So now if we look at this in the 3D view, our first step was to level, click the text away and then our second step was to fill that back in with the flat round circle and level clip the extra of that circle away and this is what you end up with is the text removed? You can do that in V carve and Aspire, but that those methods only work when you have a flat shape like this one. Let's try let's say we're trying to remove one of these stars that has more on a curved surface.
This could be text, this could be a shape, this could be anything.
This option is only available in a spire, and that's by selecting the model and then going to the sculpting tool. And this is the easiest way to remove it. So there is a couple of tools you can use here. There's one called remove and there's one called Smooths. Those two are going to be the most used ones for doing stuff like this. You can use remove and you can adjust the strength, diameter and smoothness here. And as you click on the area, you'll see you start to remove the shape there. And you
can think of this as modeling clay. So you could think of this as you're like scooping clay out of this and you'll see that will start to you want to be careful, you don't want go too low right now. This is kind of low,
but you'll see if you switch to the smooth tool. And now if you start clicking over top of this and just holding your mouse in, moving over top of this, you see that it's going to start to smooth it out
and fill it back in. But you see, we kind of went too low there in the middle. So you can also add material are using the deposit tool and just slowly add and build up some of that material back in and then switch back to the smooth tool and then click and drag to start smoothing it out more. So it's basically like you're working with clay and you're just trying to fill that in and remove it. And you can see that's getting close. It's like it's never even there. You can also just use a smooth tool without any using any other tools. If the shape isn't too high
like the star here, I start going over it with the smooth tool and just keep dragging my mouse back and forth. You can see that start going to start to slowly smoothing that out, fading it away as I do this. And there will be a slight bump there though, from the star. So that's why the remove tool will help in those situations. But as you can see, as I'm dragging it over that and kind of feathering it out, that star is basically gone. And then you can also go to the Twitter view to move your view and you can see that doesn't look too bad. You can slightly see a little bump there and a little indent there. So it does require a little bit more work to kind of massage it out. But overall, that' how it's done for odd shaped objects. So like I said, if you had text on a curved surface, that's how you can remove it. But unfortunately that's only available in Aspire. But you can either save that or cancel to disregard that and you'll be back. And now what you can do is add your own custom text and if you're using vector, you're going to have to v carve it using the V carve topaz and you can project that onto the 3D model. If you're using Aspire, you can create it as a 3D model to add your text back in
and show you how to add the text back in. So what's nice is if we created these shapes already, that's where the text was. We can now use those shapes to add or text back in. So we're going to click, draw, text
and we can choose our fonts and whatever we want. I'm just going to choose a random font here and I'm just going to type learn at the top and it will say your CNC at the bottom, click close. And now we're going to select the first line of text and hold shift and select that first box we created up here. And in this case we're going to click text on a curve.
So click on that. That's going to wrap the text on the curve. Now you'll see this is not in the correct spot. So what you can do is there'll be a little blue point there. You can grab that blue point and drag it on the line and we can drag it up here until it snaps right there in the center at the top. Next, we have some more options here for scaling the text, and we can click scale text to Fit Curves and then we can draw that drag this slider down to kind of scale the text down to a more appropriate size so you can decide how big or small you want. That can also adjust the spacing because right now you see some of the letters are overlapping. So if you drag the spacing, that will spaced the letters out
a little bit more. Another thing is it's overlapping this line at the bottom. We want it more centered of those lines. So down here at the bottom it says offset distance, you're going to adjust that. So you just type a number in there and it will offset by that number. And you can play around with that number until it looks centered, something like that. Maybe that doesn't look too bad. And then you can still further
adjust the numbers up top. And if it's also on the wrong side or off center, you can adjust the elements down here for the text position and the alignment. And if you want a vertical or a line to the curve and what
you're done, they're going to click close.
So there is the top. Next, we'll do the same thing for the bottom.
Select the text, select the box, click text on a curve, and then grab that blue point and adjust it to snap where we need it. And you can see it's on the wrong side of the line. So we can say text on other side
and that will place it below instead of above. And then once again we can scale the text using the slider, we can scale our spacing and kind of want a match similar to what we have up top. All make the distance the same as the top and just spacing some more. Okay, not too bad. So we're going to click close and there we go. There is our text. So now you see it doesn't look like anything change in the 3D view. So what you have to do is create either a topaz for these if you're using V carve or if you're using Aspire, you can create these as a 3D model. So first I'll show you the Inspire method to create as a 3D model. So you're going to go to the modeling tab, you're going to click create shape, you're going to select your text and you can select what type of shape profile you want. So maybe you want an angular profile. You could set that set your angle here. I'm going to go with no base height and I will do limit to height because you'll see right now it might not. Look I can actually make this full screen. It might not look the best with no limit. So if you do limit to height, you can kind of make it flat on the top by deciding the height of your text. So let's say I did maybe an eight inch text height and then the base height. I want to zero and I want to make sure this is adding on top. So make sure it's set to add. So that's what that's looking like so far. I can also adjust the angle to give that a different look. And you can see that that's looking much better. That looks much easier to read. And you can also set it to subtract if you want it to go below the surface instead of above. And you could still adjust the angle there to decide how you want that to carve. So it's almost like a V carving there, but I like it above for the 3D view
and the higher angle, something like that. That looks really good for this side. So that's how to do it in a Aspire and that will now be created as a brand new components. If your letters happen, do not appear.
That's probably because they're on level one and we have the clipping
applied in that area. So make sure they're in the second level or even a brand new level because you don't want them in that clipping mask that we had. So that's how to do it in Aspire. Now I'm going to remove that components and I'll show you how to do this in VCarve So Vcarve is going to be done on toolpath side. So first you're going to create your text
like I already showed you, and then you're going to carve your 3D model.
So you're going to do a roughing toolbar. We have to set it to fit in our model, so make sure it fits in here. I'm going to raise the thickness
here so our model fits and I'll put the gap above the model here and click okay. So then you're going to set up whatever settings you want to rough out your Topaz. I won't go too deep into this, but basically we could do a model boundary with either a ball, nose or an end mill, and I would usually leave a 0.0 for allowance for leaving a little material behind for the finishing to clean up. You can add a boundary offset if you want. In this case, it's just a circle. So I would probably leave a zero boundary offset and just click pick your strategy and then click calculate and that may take a minute to calculate and then you can preview it. This is going to rough it out with, in this case, a ball nose. And I usually use a 40% step over for the roughing strategy
that will calve much quicker because it's only a rough thing to look at.
So you don't need to find a results. Yeah, it's kind of proving slow
and that's because I have the quality turned up higher. Okay. And that is what the thing will look like. And it looks all those ridges are there
because I have a larger step over. But that's okay because our finishing took it's going to clean that up. And before I do that, I am going to turn the quality down on the simulation because the finishing path
will take a long time to calculate. So you can see that much quicker.
So now we will go to the 3D finish toolbar. We can do similar options, except this time I would probably use either a Bono's or a
tapered Ball nose, probably use an eighth inch tapered ball nose in this case, select that and I will do to the model boundary again with a zero offset. And I like to use the raster strategy and we'll click calculate
and this will take a little bit longer to calculate because we're working more detail and now click preview and you'll see that's what the finished drop outs will do and I'll give you a nice clean result there. And now here is the step for adding in the text to a VCarve toolpath So we're going to click Vcarve toolpath You're going to select the text in the 2D view how you want to engrave, and then you're going to select your tool
that you want to engrave it with. So whatever tool you want. This case, the letters are pretty large, so I would useat least a 90 degree V batch,
possibly even 120 degree V bit. If you have one of those, I just do a 90
since that's a common one. If you want a flat, that's you can add that in here. If you want no flat depth, you can turn it off. That's going to depend how big your letters are as well and what angle you're using.
That would determine how deep that carves. But the most important part here is you want to click project toolpath on to 3D model down at the bottom that will project it right on top of this 3D model surface. And then you're going to click calculate. And now when we click preview,
you see that will engrave directly into our 3D surface and we can even give it a two by color to see what that would look like, Painted. And then you can use a profile toolpath to cut the circle out or whatever model shape uses. And this will basically be what you left with. So that was a very good question on how to remove and change text onto a 3D model in Aspire or Vcarve that's all for this video, make sure you like and subscribe for more. And if you want to master your Vectric software, make sure you check out my vetcric training classes linked right here where we go much more in depth. How to use the metric software step by step and included with my training courses is weekly Q&A calls where I can answer your questions one on one and get the support you need. And if you want to watch another great vectric tip, check out this video posted right here.
on this model and you'll see you could do something like this where you remove the text and now you have the ability to add your own text. So I'm going to show you how that's done. And this can be done in Vcarve or Aspire. So that's another great thing. First off, this is how the model started when I imported it,and this was a purchase file from online
and already had the text in place. And then in the 2D view, what I had to do is isolate the area as with the text. So basically I just drew these shapes around the areas and it doesn't have to be super clean lines like I did here. You can draw like a rough sketch around these. All what I did was created a circle offset of the circle twice and then created lines here to box it off. And I could show you how I did that for this example. But you can just use the freehand draw tool if you want it to and just freehand vector around. There just has to be a closed vector around your text. Another tip is this only this method I'm about to show you only really works if it's a flat area. If it's on a curved area, I will show you how to do that as well. It's a little bit different technique, but the flat area is the easier technique that I'll show you. So I am going to recreate this or hide this layer or add a new layer and I will show you how I created the boxes around the text. So first thing is you could either select your model and go to the modeling tab and click create vector boundary that will create a boundary around the outside of the model. Or if this in this case, since it's a circle, you could just use
the draw circle tool and created your own custom circle. It doesn't matter. Either way is fine. The only thing I like about doing a custom
circle is you see the vector boundary will add a bunch of crazy nodes
because of that pixelation on the edges of the model. So if you were to do that, you could select the shape and see at the bottom here it is a 15.54 inch diameter. You can also go to the scale tool to figure that out
and you can copy that measurement, copy value, and then delete that and then go to the circle tool. Since this is a circle, go to diameter and paste it in here and then just click in the center and click close.
And now if you go to Node edit, you can see that is a much cleaner vector
with only four nodes. So that's generally what I like to do there.
So now we have to offset this line to just so it goes around the edge of our text so we could either just guess the measurement there, we could measure it using the measure tool, or we can scale it directly on the screen just by visualizing it, looking at it here. But you will see once you click away from the model, it fades away. So you might not be able to see the text. So if that happens, you could click on the model and right
click on it and go to object properties. And then what it's fading is
could turn this fading down until you start to see the text and then click close. And now when you do select it, you can still see the text.
So if you want to do the freehand method, which is easier and quicker than measuring and everything, you could select the circle we just created. And you can either scale this one down or make a copy so you can copy it and paste it. And then this pasted one you can hold shift to keep it centered and grab one of the corners and start scaling it down until you see it go right after the border of the sign, but before the text.
So you want to just so it's around the text itself.
And now we'll do that again. We'll paste that original circle and again
and hold shift and start scaling this circle down until it's on the
opposite side of the text. And there we go. Now that circle is on the opposite side of the text, and now we're getting close and you want to make sure look all around it, make sure the text does not cross the lines at any point. And we looks like we're good. There. Okay, So that's the initial shape there. If we didn't have these shapes in the middle here, the spades, then we could just leave it like that. But since we want to keep those shapes there, we're going to have to box these parts of the text off. So to do that, we take the draw line tool. And what I do is just draw a freehand line here, just draw two points and I cross those two circles we just made and click spacebar to stop the line. I cross that by a lot there, just so we can trim that later. With the trim tool,
it's a little bit easier to trim when you have a little bit more of a overhang like that. So I'll do that again up here. Just stopping the line there after the text and then we'll go over here before the text. So we'll need four lines in this case before and after both sections of the text. And once you're done, you can right click to close down the line tool. And now we can use the scissor tool to make sure the box is checked to join all of these together after we trim. And then you're going to trim all these overhangs from those two lines we just created on both sides. So it should look like that. And all you have to do is using the scissor tools. Click on those lines we don't want and all these overhangs we don't want. And there you go. Now click close. And now we have two shapes that are boxed around the text. So that is our first step to isolate the text with a closed sector. And now we we have to remove the text and then we have to fill back in what we remove. The reason for those steps is why it's easier to do this in a flat shape. So go to the duty view. You see, this is what we have now is what we imported. So if we split our view so we can see both at the same time, there's a couple of ways you can remove the text, but the easiest way is by selecting these two shapes and go to the modeling tab. Now you can use the level clipping option So you want to select these two shapes here around the text and then we'll just select the outer circle, right click on the level, go to clipping and click apply. And there we go. Now that removes the text that was in those closed vectors and keeps everything else
that was inside of that outer circle. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it. I could show you how to do that. That's remove the clipping. Whoops. Remove clipping. Now we're back to original. You can see this other method I used was by creating the text to go lower below the surface and then creating a shape to cover them up and merging that on top. So that's another way you can do it. Either way is fine though.
I would probably just stick with that method I showed you already.
That's the easier way. So let's just stick with that by applying that clipping which removes that. So your next step will be to add a brand new level. So you're going to right click on level one and you're going to click insert new level. And the reason you do this is because if you add anything else to level one, it's still going to be clipped in those areas. So we want to fill those areas in. So in order to do that, we need a new level for that to be on. So in this new level, we're going to select it and then you're going to go to the clip art tab and go to the clip art library, then go to domes and dishes and depending on your shape will be depending on which shape you choose here. If you're working with a rectangle, choose rectangle, circle, choose circle, Square, choose square. But basically you're going to choose the flat around circle in this case. So double click on that. I'll put it centered over your project. And then we have to scale this holding shift and one of these corners and you're going to scale it bigger than your project. You want to overhanging the sides and you'll see right away it's not going to look correct. That's okay, because we still have some work to do on this, but that's our first step there. Now we're going to go back to the modeling tab, and right away we have to switch the combined mode of the level. Right now it's set to add and that's why one is on top of the other. So instead, we want these two merge together. So you're going to right click on the new level, go to combine mode and switch it to merge and you'll see that's looking closer to what we want. They're now merging together
instead of adding together. So now we just have to adjust the height of the model by double clicking on that flat round circle. And then where it says shape height, you can raise and lower this and you'll see if we zoom in to the areas we removed right now, it's too low. So we'll raise it up
by dragging the slider and you want to slowly creep up until it removes that edge there. Maybe you just want to go just a little bit more. There we go. Now it looks nice and smooth there. So that's the correct height we want. So now we're going to close that. And now you see we're getting very close. The text is now gone and filled in. But you see now it's
also affecting the outside of the model and the inside of the model.
So any areas that are affected that you don't want filled in you're going to create shapes around those areas. And you'll see I already did that before I created an outer circle like we did before, and I created an inner circle, the same diameter as this inner circle. So now all you have to do, select the circles or whatever shapes you created to trace out the areas that you want to remove that extra. And then you're going to right
click on that new level with the flat round circle on it, and you're going to go to clipping and you're going to click apply and there you go.
And that's all the steps needed. And now what that has done is clipped
the flat round circle outside of those two circles and removed that extra material. So now if we look at this in the 3D view, our first step was to level, click the text away and then our second step was to fill that back in with the flat round circle and level clip the extra of that circle away and this is what you end up with is the text removed? You can do that in V carve and Aspire, but that those methods only work when you have a flat shape like this one. Let's try let's say we're trying to remove one of these stars that has more on a curved surface.
This could be text, this could be a shape, this could be anything.
This option is only available in a spire, and that's by selecting the model and then going to the sculpting tool. And this is the easiest way to remove it. So there is a couple of tools you can use here. There's one called remove and there's one called Smooths. Those two are going to be the most used ones for doing stuff like this. You can use remove and you can adjust the strength, diameter and smoothness here. And as you click on the area, you'll see you start to remove the shape there. And you
can think of this as modeling clay. So you could think of this as you're like scooping clay out of this and you'll see that will start to you want to be careful, you don't want go too low right now. This is kind of low,
but you'll see if you switch to the smooth tool. And now if you start clicking over top of this and just holding your mouse in, moving over top of this, you see that it's going to start to smooth it out
and fill it back in. But you see, we kind of went too low there in the middle. So you can also add material are using the deposit tool and just slowly add and build up some of that material back in and then switch back to the smooth tool and then click and drag to start smoothing it out more. So it's basically like you're working with clay and you're just trying to fill that in and remove it. And you can see that's getting close. It's like it's never even there. You can also just use a smooth tool without any using any other tools. If the shape isn't too high
like the star here, I start going over it with the smooth tool and just keep dragging my mouse back and forth. You can see that start going to start to slowly smoothing that out, fading it away as I do this. And there will be a slight bump there though, from the star. So that's why the remove tool will help in those situations. But as you can see, as I'm dragging it over that and kind of feathering it out, that star is basically gone. And then you can also go to the Twitter view to move your view and you can see that doesn't look too bad. You can slightly see a little bump there and a little indent there. So it does require a little bit more work to kind of massage it out. But overall, that' how it's done for odd shaped objects. So like I said, if you had text on a curved surface, that's how you can remove it. But unfortunately that's only available in Aspire. But you can either save that or cancel to disregard that and you'll be back. And now what you can do is add your own custom text and if you're using vector, you're going to have to v carve it using the V carve topaz and you can project that onto the 3D model. If you're using Aspire, you can create it as a 3D model to add your text back in
and show you how to add the text back in. So what's nice is if we created these shapes already, that's where the text was. We can now use those shapes to add or text back in. So we're going to click, draw, text
and we can choose our fonts and whatever we want. I'm just going to choose a random font here and I'm just going to type learn at the top and it will say your CNC at the bottom, click close. And now we're going to select the first line of text and hold shift and select that first box we created up here. And in this case we're going to click text on a curve.
So click on that. That's going to wrap the text on the curve. Now you'll see this is not in the correct spot. So what you can do is there'll be a little blue point there. You can grab that blue point and drag it on the line and we can drag it up here until it snaps right there in the center at the top. Next, we have some more options here for scaling the text, and we can click scale text to Fit Curves and then we can draw that drag this slider down to kind of scale the text down to a more appropriate size so you can decide how big or small you want. That can also adjust the spacing because right now you see some of the letters are overlapping. So if you drag the spacing, that will spaced the letters out
a little bit more. Another thing is it's overlapping this line at the bottom. We want it more centered of those lines. So down here at the bottom it says offset distance, you're going to adjust that. So you just type a number in there and it will offset by that number. And you can play around with that number until it looks centered, something like that. Maybe that doesn't look too bad. And then you can still further
adjust the numbers up top. And if it's also on the wrong side or off center, you can adjust the elements down here for the text position and the alignment. And if you want a vertical or a line to the curve and what
you're done, they're going to click close.
So there is the top. Next, we'll do the same thing for the bottom.
Select the text, select the box, click text on a curve, and then grab that blue point and adjust it to snap where we need it. And you can see it's on the wrong side of the line. So we can say text on other side
and that will place it below instead of above. And then once again we can scale the text using the slider, we can scale our spacing and kind of want a match similar to what we have up top. All make the distance the same as the top and just spacing some more. Okay, not too bad. So we're going to click close and there we go. There is our text. So now you see it doesn't look like anything change in the 3D view. So what you have to do is create either a topaz for these if you're using V carve or if you're using Aspire, you can create these as a 3D model. So first I'll show you the Inspire method to create as a 3D model. So you're going to go to the modeling tab, you're going to click create shape, you're going to select your text and you can select what type of shape profile you want. So maybe you want an angular profile. You could set that set your angle here. I'm going to go with no base height and I will do limit to height because you'll see right now it might not. Look I can actually make this full screen. It might not look the best with no limit. So if you do limit to height, you can kind of make it flat on the top by deciding the height of your text. So let's say I did maybe an eight inch text height and then the base height. I want to zero and I want to make sure this is adding on top. So make sure it's set to add. So that's what that's looking like so far. I can also adjust the angle to give that a different look. And you can see that that's looking much better. That looks much easier to read. And you can also set it to subtract if you want it to go below the surface instead of above. And you could still adjust the angle there to decide how you want that to carve. So it's almost like a V carving there, but I like it above for the 3D view
and the higher angle, something like that. That looks really good for this side. So that's how to do it in a Aspire and that will now be created as a brand new components. If your letters happen, do not appear.
That's probably because they're on level one and we have the clipping
applied in that area. So make sure they're in the second level or even a brand new level because you don't want them in that clipping mask that we had. So that's how to do it in Aspire. Now I'm going to remove that components and I'll show you how to do this in VCarve So Vcarve is going to be done on toolpath side. So first you're going to create your text
like I already showed you, and then you're going to carve your 3D model.
So you're going to do a roughing toolbar. We have to set it to fit in our model, so make sure it fits in here. I'm going to raise the thickness
here so our model fits and I'll put the gap above the model here and click okay. So then you're going to set up whatever settings you want to rough out your Topaz. I won't go too deep into this, but basically we could do a model boundary with either a ball, nose or an end mill, and I would usually leave a 0.0 for allowance for leaving a little material behind for the finishing to clean up. You can add a boundary offset if you want. In this case, it's just a circle. So I would probably leave a zero boundary offset and just click pick your strategy and then click calculate and that may take a minute to calculate and then you can preview it. This is going to rough it out with, in this case, a ball nose. And I usually use a 40% step over for the roughing strategy
that will calve much quicker because it's only a rough thing to look at.
So you don't need to find a results. Yeah, it's kind of proving slow
and that's because I have the quality turned up higher. Okay. And that is what the thing will look like. And it looks all those ridges are there
because I have a larger step over. But that's okay because our finishing took it's going to clean that up. And before I do that, I am going to turn the quality down on the simulation because the finishing path
will take a long time to calculate. So you can see that much quicker.
So now we will go to the 3D finish toolbar. We can do similar options, except this time I would probably use either a Bono's or a
tapered Ball nose, probably use an eighth inch tapered ball nose in this case, select that and I will do to the model boundary again with a zero offset. And I like to use the raster strategy and we'll click calculate
and this will take a little bit longer to calculate because we're working more detail and now click preview and you'll see that's what the finished drop outs will do and I'll give you a nice clean result there. And now here is the step for adding in the text to a VCarve toolpath So we're going to click Vcarve toolpath You're going to select the text in the 2D view how you want to engrave, and then you're going to select your tool
that you want to engrave it with. So whatever tool you want. This case, the letters are pretty large, so I would useat least a 90 degree V batch,
possibly even 120 degree V bit. If you have one of those, I just do a 90
since that's a common one. If you want a flat, that's you can add that in here. If you want no flat depth, you can turn it off. That's going to depend how big your letters are as well and what angle you're using.
That would determine how deep that carves. But the most important part here is you want to click project toolpath on to 3D model down at the bottom that will project it right on top of this 3D model surface. And then you're going to click calculate. And now when we click preview,
you see that will engrave directly into our 3D surface and we can even give it a two by color to see what that would look like, Painted. And then you can use a profile toolpath to cut the circle out or whatever model shape uses. And this will basically be what you left with. So that was a very good question on how to remove and change text onto a 3D model in Aspire or Vcarve that's all for this video, make sure you like and subscribe for more. And if you want to master your Vectric software, make sure you check out my vetcric training classes linked right here where we go much more in depth. How to use the metric software step by step and included with my training courses is weekly Q&A calls where I can answer your questions one on one and get the support you need. And if you want to watch another great vectric tip, check out this video posted right here.
