How to make 3D text with VCarve Pro or Desktop
How to remove 3D text or objects from an imported 3D model and then add custom text back into the 3D model with VCarve Pro or VCarve Desktop. This lesson also applies to Vectric Aspire.
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Video Transcript:
In my last quick tip video, I showed you how to take this 3D model that we imported into the software. And then I showed you how to remove the text and then customize it with your very own text. And if you're using Aspire, you can add your own custom 3D text, which gives you a lot of flexibility. But I did show if you're using VCarve, either desktop or VCarve Pro, the option to add text was to actually VCarve it.
And I will show you what that looks like. We actually use the project onto 3D model option. And when you preview that, you can see you can add your own custom text, but it is below the surface, not above the surface, just like the Aspire version was. Now in that last video I got quite a few comments asking if it is possible in VCarve Desktop or VCarve Pro to add custom 3D text to a model that you remove the text from and the answer to that is actually yes, you can.
There's a little bit of a workaround to make it happen, but it is possible. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to do it. And also, if you missed my last video where I showed you how to remove and customize this text, make sure you check that out up in the top corner here.
And now we're going to get into how to add custom 3d text in VCarve. Okay like I mentioned, if you watched our last video, you saw how it is possible to take a imported 3d model, remove the text, and then add your own custom text. And that custom text option is only available in Aspire where you can really customize the profile of those shapes.
You can see we have a little bit of an angled edge on this one because we chose the angle profile. You can also do rounded and even custom profiles for your text. So I will show you some workarounds where you can actually do that in VCarve as well in a 3D format. So I'm going to remove that Aspire text that was added.
And now we are at a point where you can get to in VCarve, just like I showed you in the last video. But this time, in order to add the text as a 3D model inside of Aspire, this is where you're going to have to do a little bit of a workaround. So your first step is going to be inserting a new level by right clicking on the topmost level and click Insert New Level.
With that level selected, you're going to go to the Clipart library. You're going to go to the Domes and Dishes folder. And then you're going to find one of these flat shapes here. And like I mentioned in the last video, it will depend on the shape of your model which one you select here. Doesn't really matter too much.
In this case I'm working with a circle, so I'm going to use the flat round circle. So just double click on that. That will bring it into your 3D model. And if you have to scale it up or down, you can do that now. Just hold the shift key to keep it centered. And grab one of these corners and start scaling this until it's bigger than your text.
It doesn't matter so much how much bigger, just make sure it's a little bit bigger than your text. Because you can see in the 3D view, it is rounded on the edge. So you don't want that rounded part to end up inside of your text. So just make sure that's bigger than your text. And don't worry about creating too much extra because we are going to remove that in the next step.
So next we're going to go to the modeling tab. And you could see the flat round circle was added to that new level. And now in order to create that into the 3d text, all you have to do is select the text that you added inside of the 2d view. And if you need to know how to add that, check out my last video, I showed you how to do that and just select your text there and then right click on that new level for go down to clipping and click apply.
And you'll see in the 3d view that now clipped the flat round circle to clip around all those letters. So I like to picture that as it's a cookie cutter. So whatever you select there is like a cookie cutter that cut that flat round circle and removed all the extra material around it. So now we are left with the 3d text.
And you can see it's fairly tall right now, so we can also adjust the height of that by double clicking on that flat round circle shape. And then in here you can adjust the base height and the shape height. Really though, you only have to adjust the shape height because this is a flat shape.
So you can go up or down with this and decide how thick you want to make it. And you can see, you can just keep doing a little minor adjustments until it gets where you exactly where you want it. Now keep in mind this is set to a combined mode of merge, so it is merging with the bottom shape as well. So the current shape height is from the bottom of the model measured to the top of these letters.
If you wanted just the measurement of the thickness of the letters, you would switch this to a combined mode of add. Now it's going to add on top of the previous components. And then whatever shape height you add in here, let's say we wanted 8th inch tall letters, we would type in eighth inch and click spacebar to accept.
And now these letters will be exactly eighth inch from the surface below it. So that's how you can get exactly what shape thickness you'd want there. So there you go now we have some custom 3D text. And like I said, this is all available to do in VCarve desktop or VCarve pro as well as Aspire, but Aspire has easier options like I showed last week.
So now if we look at this in the 3d view, you can see that's basically all you need to do to add your own custom 3d text to a VCarve model. But if we look at this closer, you could see the edges of the letters are straight vertically up and down. That's really not an issue. You can carve it like that. No problem.
But you can see the Aspire text we added last week. This has an angle that you can actually customize, whatever angle you'd want on the edge of the letters and that just adds a little bit extra, uh, look to the letters. So that's an optional step if you want to do that or not. There is a way to do that in VCarve, but it's a little bit of a workaround.
Aspire is definitely easier to do that with, but I will show you how to do that in VCarve as well. So after you get your text added in a 3d model, your next step is going to be making the 3d toolpaths. So this will be the 3d roughing and the 3d finishing toolpath. I already created one here, all I have to do now is recalculate it because I just added that text.
So if I right click on that and click recalculate, that's going to recalculate that toolpath to add in the new text. And you can see it did it successfully, so I'm going to click OK. And now if I go to the preview and click preview selected toolpath, you can see it's going to preview this with our new added three dimensional text.
And this is exactly what it would look like in VCarve. And if we zoom in, you could see the text looks perfectly fine. You can do it just like this with no problems. But like I said, these are vertical sidewalls on the text. So if you wanted to add an angle to that. You can do that, and that's by adding an additional toolpath with a VCarve bit.
Now, keep in mind, this is only going to work properly if it is a flat area underneath the text. If you're working on a curved surface, this will not work as well. So, what you're going to want to do is make sure you're on a flat surface like this one is. And then what you're going to do is in the 2d view, you're going to select your text and you want to create a toolpath for that using the profile toolpath.
Now before we do that, we need to know the depth of that toolpath and we can find that out by actually hovering over our top surface here and you can see in the bottom, lower right corner, it is going to show you the X, Y, and Z location of your mouse cursor. And right now, Z is equal to 0 at the top here.
And that is because I zeroed my toolpaths off the material's surface. Now, to find the depth that I need to make this toolpath, I have to hover my mouse over top of the flat surface that is below the text. And now you can see the Z is equal to negative 0.6499. So that is the depth of our toolpath that we are going to make.
So now we can close this. And like I said, we're going to go to the Profile toolpath. You're going to set your cut depth, whatever depth we just measured. In this case it's 6, 4, 9, 9. And then you want to select your V bit that you want to use. Now this is going to control what type of angle is on the edge of the letters.
So if you use a 60 degree V bit, that will give you a 30 degree angle on the edge of your letters. If you use a 90 degree V bit, that will give you a 45 degree angle on your letters. So whatever angle V bit you use. Half of that angle will be the angle on your, uh, your text. So select whatever tool you want.
You want to set the machine vectors to go on the line and also keep in mind, it is imagining that there's still material above this. So it's actually doing six passes to cut to that depth. So if you wanted to, you can adjust the start depth. If you know that depth, which you can hover your mouse over the top of the text there and it is negative So you can actually make our start depth 0.525 here.
But then you would have to adjust the cut depth to be the thickness of your letters, which in this case is one eighth of an inch. So that is one option to reduce the number of passes. The other option is since these letters are only one eighth of an inch thick, I can say I'm perfectly fine with doing that in one full pass.
Then I could just click edit passes. Click clear all passes and then click OK and now it'll do it in one full pass. So, either of those two options will work to adjust the number of passes, and that's just going to save you some time on the machining. You could have left it at six passes, but those first four or five passes will only be cutting air and nothing else.
So that would be the reason you would want to adjust the number of passes. Okay, next, just make sure you're cutting the machine vectors on the line, and you really don't need any ramps. You definitely don't need tabs, and you can change anything else you want to change, but this is going to be okay for this.
You do not want to project toolpaths onto 3d model. And that is because you are right on the edge of this 3d model of the text. And you're also in between the flat surface there. So it will probably get confused on the heights in those areas. So definitely don't turn that on. Just use the settings we just use here and click calculate.
And now you can see that adds an additional toolpath that will take that V bit and just bevel the edges of all those letters. So now we're going to click preview and you can see we have a slight bevel around all of those edges and you can see it does leave a little lip there and that is due to the fact that we used a larger ball nose for this.
So there was a radius left there from the ball nose that actually looks like a little bit of a neat effect there, almost like a shadowing effect. So if you wanted to keep that, you can. If not, what you would have to do is either use a smaller ball nose to cut the 3D toolpath to reduce that, or you would have to make a slight offset from the text and actually use a different toolpath in there.
Probably the VCarve toolpath. Selecting both the offsetted line and the line edging this, the edge of the text. So you'd actually have to play around with your offsets to get that properly working. So I will leave that part up to you, but as you can see, it is possible to add a slight bevel to three dimensional text.
In VCarve desktop or VCarve pro. And like I mentioned it, this is way easier to do in Aspire. Like I mentioned last week, but if you don't have Aspire and of course, Aspire is a large upgrade and as far as cost, so not all of us have that. So this is a good workaround if you do not. So hopefully those tips helped you out.
And if they did make sure you like, and subscribe for new tips posted every week. 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 Vectric training classes linked right here, where we go much more in depth how to use the Vectric 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.
And I will show you what that looks like. We actually use the project onto 3D model option. And when you preview that, you can see you can add your own custom text, but it is below the surface, not above the surface, just like the Aspire version was. Now in that last video I got quite a few comments asking if it is possible in VCarve Desktop or VCarve Pro to add custom 3D text to a model that you remove the text from and the answer to that is actually yes, you can.
There's a little bit of a workaround to make it happen, but it is possible. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to do it. And also, if you missed my last video where I showed you how to remove and customize this text, make sure you check that out up in the top corner here.
And now we're going to get into how to add custom 3d text in VCarve. Okay like I mentioned, if you watched our last video, you saw how it is possible to take a imported 3d model, remove the text, and then add your own custom text. And that custom text option is only available in Aspire where you can really customize the profile of those shapes.
You can see we have a little bit of an angled edge on this one because we chose the angle profile. You can also do rounded and even custom profiles for your text. So I will show you some workarounds where you can actually do that in VCarve as well in a 3D format. So I'm going to remove that Aspire text that was added.
And now we are at a point where you can get to in VCarve, just like I showed you in the last video. But this time, in order to add the text as a 3D model inside of Aspire, this is where you're going to have to do a little bit of a workaround. So your first step is going to be inserting a new level by right clicking on the topmost level and click Insert New Level.
With that level selected, you're going to go to the Clipart library. You're going to go to the Domes and Dishes folder. And then you're going to find one of these flat shapes here. And like I mentioned in the last video, it will depend on the shape of your model which one you select here. Doesn't really matter too much.
In this case I'm working with a circle, so I'm going to use the flat round circle. So just double click on that. That will bring it into your 3D model. And if you have to scale it up or down, you can do that now. Just hold the shift key to keep it centered. And grab one of these corners and start scaling this until it's bigger than your text.
It doesn't matter so much how much bigger, just make sure it's a little bit bigger than your text. Because you can see in the 3D view, it is rounded on the edge. So you don't want that rounded part to end up inside of your text. So just make sure that's bigger than your text. And don't worry about creating too much extra because we are going to remove that in the next step.
So next we're going to go to the modeling tab. And you could see the flat round circle was added to that new level. And now in order to create that into the 3d text, all you have to do is select the text that you added inside of the 2d view. And if you need to know how to add that, check out my last video, I showed you how to do that and just select your text there and then right click on that new level for go down to clipping and click apply.
And you'll see in the 3d view that now clipped the flat round circle to clip around all those letters. So I like to picture that as it's a cookie cutter. So whatever you select there is like a cookie cutter that cut that flat round circle and removed all the extra material around it. So now we are left with the 3d text.
And you can see it's fairly tall right now, so we can also adjust the height of that by double clicking on that flat round circle shape. And then in here you can adjust the base height and the shape height. Really though, you only have to adjust the shape height because this is a flat shape.
So you can go up or down with this and decide how thick you want to make it. And you can see, you can just keep doing a little minor adjustments until it gets where you exactly where you want it. Now keep in mind this is set to a combined mode of merge, so it is merging with the bottom shape as well. So the current shape height is from the bottom of the model measured to the top of these letters.
If you wanted just the measurement of the thickness of the letters, you would switch this to a combined mode of add. Now it's going to add on top of the previous components. And then whatever shape height you add in here, let's say we wanted 8th inch tall letters, we would type in eighth inch and click spacebar to accept.
And now these letters will be exactly eighth inch from the surface below it. So that's how you can get exactly what shape thickness you'd want there. So there you go now we have some custom 3D text. And like I said, this is all available to do in VCarve desktop or VCarve pro as well as Aspire, but Aspire has easier options like I showed last week.
So now if we look at this in the 3d view, you can see that's basically all you need to do to add your own custom 3d text to a VCarve model. But if we look at this closer, you could see the edges of the letters are straight vertically up and down. That's really not an issue. You can carve it like that. No problem.
But you can see the Aspire text we added last week. This has an angle that you can actually customize, whatever angle you'd want on the edge of the letters and that just adds a little bit extra, uh, look to the letters. So that's an optional step if you want to do that or not. There is a way to do that in VCarve, but it's a little bit of a workaround.
Aspire is definitely easier to do that with, but I will show you how to do that in VCarve as well. So after you get your text added in a 3d model, your next step is going to be making the 3d toolpaths. So this will be the 3d roughing and the 3d finishing toolpath. I already created one here, all I have to do now is recalculate it because I just added that text.
So if I right click on that and click recalculate, that's going to recalculate that toolpath to add in the new text. And you can see it did it successfully, so I'm going to click OK. And now if I go to the preview and click preview selected toolpath, you can see it's going to preview this with our new added three dimensional text.
And this is exactly what it would look like in VCarve. And if we zoom in, you could see the text looks perfectly fine. You can do it just like this with no problems. But like I said, these are vertical sidewalls on the text. So if you wanted to add an angle to that. You can do that, and that's by adding an additional toolpath with a VCarve bit.
Now, keep in mind, this is only going to work properly if it is a flat area underneath the text. If you're working on a curved surface, this will not work as well. So, what you're going to want to do is make sure you're on a flat surface like this one is. And then what you're going to do is in the 2d view, you're going to select your text and you want to create a toolpath for that using the profile toolpath.
Now before we do that, we need to know the depth of that toolpath and we can find that out by actually hovering over our top surface here and you can see in the bottom, lower right corner, it is going to show you the X, Y, and Z location of your mouse cursor. And right now, Z is equal to 0 at the top here.
And that is because I zeroed my toolpaths off the material's surface. Now, to find the depth that I need to make this toolpath, I have to hover my mouse over top of the flat surface that is below the text. And now you can see the Z is equal to negative 0.6499. So that is the depth of our toolpath that we are going to make.
So now we can close this. And like I said, we're going to go to the Profile toolpath. You're going to set your cut depth, whatever depth we just measured. In this case it's 6, 4, 9, 9. And then you want to select your V bit that you want to use. Now this is going to control what type of angle is on the edge of the letters.
So if you use a 60 degree V bit, that will give you a 30 degree angle on the edge of your letters. If you use a 90 degree V bit, that will give you a 45 degree angle on your letters. So whatever angle V bit you use. Half of that angle will be the angle on your, uh, your text. So select whatever tool you want.
You want to set the machine vectors to go on the line and also keep in mind, it is imagining that there's still material above this. So it's actually doing six passes to cut to that depth. So if you wanted to, you can adjust the start depth. If you know that depth, which you can hover your mouse over the top of the text there and it is negative So you can actually make our start depth 0.525 here.
But then you would have to adjust the cut depth to be the thickness of your letters, which in this case is one eighth of an inch. So that is one option to reduce the number of passes. The other option is since these letters are only one eighth of an inch thick, I can say I'm perfectly fine with doing that in one full pass.
Then I could just click edit passes. Click clear all passes and then click OK and now it'll do it in one full pass. So, either of those two options will work to adjust the number of passes, and that's just going to save you some time on the machining. You could have left it at six passes, but those first four or five passes will only be cutting air and nothing else.
So that would be the reason you would want to adjust the number of passes. Okay, next, just make sure you're cutting the machine vectors on the line, and you really don't need any ramps. You definitely don't need tabs, and you can change anything else you want to change, but this is going to be okay for this.
You do not want to project toolpaths onto 3d model. And that is because you are right on the edge of this 3d model of the text. And you're also in between the flat surface there. So it will probably get confused on the heights in those areas. So definitely don't turn that on. Just use the settings we just use here and click calculate.
And now you can see that adds an additional toolpath that will take that V bit and just bevel the edges of all those letters. So now we're going to click preview and you can see we have a slight bevel around all of those edges and you can see it does leave a little lip there and that is due to the fact that we used a larger ball nose for this.
So there was a radius left there from the ball nose that actually looks like a little bit of a neat effect there, almost like a shadowing effect. So if you wanted to keep that, you can. If not, what you would have to do is either use a smaller ball nose to cut the 3D toolpath to reduce that, or you would have to make a slight offset from the text and actually use a different toolpath in there.
Probably the VCarve toolpath. Selecting both the offsetted line and the line edging this, the edge of the text. So you'd actually have to play around with your offsets to get that properly working. So I will leave that part up to you, but as you can see, it is possible to add a slight bevel to three dimensional text.
In VCarve desktop or VCarve pro. And like I mentioned it, this is way easier to do in Aspire. Like I mentioned last week, but if you don't have Aspire and of course, Aspire is a large upgrade and as far as cost, so not all of us have that. So this is a good workaround if you do not. So hopefully those tips helped you out.
And if they did make sure you like, and subscribe for new tips posted every week. 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 Vectric training classes linked right here, where we go much more in depth how to use the Vectric 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.
