Make Corners Sharp Again
How to use the extend tool to clean up vectors and make messy corners nice and sharp in Vectric software. This lesson applies to Vectric VCarve, Aspire, and Cut2D.
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Video Transcript:
Hello everyone. In this quick tip, we're gonna look at how to make nice, sharp corners. Especially when you import an image and you try to trace it, you may notice that you get these rounded corners. So we're gonna look at how to take these rounded corners and easily make them into nice, sharp corners like you see here.
So you can see that letter A has really nice, sharp corners, and this will give you nice clean carves when you go to carve these objects. All right, you can see to get started, I just imported an image that I'm going to Bitmap Trace, and this is my logo here. So we're gonna go to the Trace Bitmap tool and I'm gonna start off with all the default settings and just click preview.
And you could see if you zoom in, you will notice that some of these corners are going to be cut off a little bit. They're not gonna be nice, sharp corners. And that generally happens, uh, when you use the Trace Bitmap tool, you'll see some of them will be okay, like this letter E looks really good, but some of them, like the letter A you'll see will be a little bit messed up.
So that's something you want to take a look at. And there is an option here that says Corner Fit. And you could make those loose or tight, and I'll show you what that will do. So you want to pay attention to corners like this with a nice, smooth arc. And then also the sharp corners so if we make the corner fit all the way up to a very tight fit and click preview.
That may make some of the tighter corners better, but you could see we still have some messed up corners. But you'll see for the arch corners, it's gonna make those a little bit more messy. So there is a fine line there, you don't want to go too tight because if you have round corners, that will mess those up.
So I'm gonna switch that back to default and click preview and you'll see that will smoothen that out some. And even if you went, uh, to a looser setting and click preview, it'll smoothen out even more. So I generally go with the default unless it looks terrible and I just want to change it more. So you wanna play around with those settings, but we're gonna start off here and click apply and then close.
And now we have a simple traced bitmap. And you can go ahead and use these vectors and start making a toolpath, and you'll be fine with that. But you will notice that your carves may be a little bit messy because these vectors are messy. So it all depends on how clean of a carve you want in the end. But this will take a little extra time to clean up, but it'll definitely make your carves much better in the results.
So this is gonna be up to you if you wanna spend this little extra time to clean up your files. Now with texts like this, you could probably just replace the text using the text tool, but you're not always gonna have that option if it's a design. So I will show you how you can clean those corners up very easily using one single tool.
So we're gonna focus on this letter A. And before we do this, I'm going to select all of the vectors by drawing a selection box around that and then just hold shift and deselect the picture. And then I'm gonna right click on the vectors and click copy to layer. And I'm gonna make a backup copy so we can see the difference that we make in our changes.
So I'm gonna go to a new layer and I'll just leave it layer two. I'll make it red and I'm gonna make it not visible, so it's going to be hidden for right now and click okay. And now we can focus on these original vectors. So I'm only gonna focus on the letter A for this example, just to save the time from doing the entire file.
But you'll see these techniques you can use for the entire file. So what I like to do is select all the vectors that I want to edit. So I will select all the shapes surrounding this letter A, and then I click the letter N to go to the node editing. And this letter A will be very simple because it's all straight lines, so there's no arcs or curves that we have to deal with.
So the way this should be set up is having one single node in each corner, and there should be no nodes in the middle of these lines. So what I like to do to clean this up is first delete the nodes in between the end points. So I'm just gonna hover over that node and click the letter D to delete it. And I will delete any nodes that do not fall on a corner, just like that.
And then we're gonna come down here to a corner and you don't want to delete this node, uh, because it will move this angled line. So what I do instead is delete this span. So I just hover over the span and click the letter D to delete it. And I'm going to fix this later with the tool that I'll show you in a second.
Okay, and then we're gonna come over to this one and let's delete any nodes in between here, just like this. And you'll see that one just messed up there so I will click undo, and instead of deleting that node, I will delete this span. Zoom in a little bit and click the letter D to delete that span and that leaves that line there for reference of the angle that it's at.
And then I would delete this node right here. And your whole goal here is you want the angled line to stay there, but we want the corners removed that we're gonna clean up later. So this corner here, we'll delete that. This corner here will delete that span. And I will show you if you were to delete the node instead, you couldn't do that, but you're gonna have a harder time getting that exact angle.
So you'll see if I delete this node, it's going to move to this node and it will change the angle a little bit. So you could just take this node and drag it back out, but you kind of have to eyeball it wherever you wanna put it there. So that is an option to do that. Uh, that will work just fine, but I'll show you the other option we're gonna use will get these corners more exact.
So I'm gonna edit, undo that, and then delete just the span in the corner by clicking the letter D while hovering over the uh, line span there. And then the center portion, I'm going to delete all the crazy lines up here, leaving that corner open. I'll delete this node that's in the middle there, and then I'll delete this corner here, leaving that open.
Okay, and that's what I would do is just go around the entire file and delete all the corners that are messed up and any nodes in between. And you can see already, this is looking a lot cleaner. Uh, one thing I may do up here too, you see that line is a little bit of an angle, so you could drag this down a little bit to straighten it up.
You can also drag a guideline down, snap it to one end, and that will give you an exact horizontal line you can snap to and that will clean that up a lot there. Okay, so now we just have to fix all of these corners. And to do that is just one single tool and it's in the edit objects menu here, and it's called Extend.
So we're gonna click on that. And you see there's no options in this tool. All you have to do is go right on the screen, click two lines that you want to extend, and they'll meet at a common point where they intersect. So we're gonna click the end of this line and the end of this line, and you'll see they'll connect at the intersection point.
So you see this is very easy to use. Just click two lines that intersect at a point, and you'll see all the corners will be nice and sharp. And you go around the entire file, just clicking the ends of both lines. And you'll see sometimes, right now you see it's not letting me select this. So if that does happen, just close down the tool, open it back up, and just select it in the opposite order.
And that usually will fix it. All right, looks like I got all the corners just by clicking the two ends, and then click close. Now, the final step here is you may have to join these back together. You'll see if you had multiple open ends, it may not join all the lines back together. So right now, these are all open vectors, so what you want to do is select the entire shape by drawing a selection box around it.
And then go to the join tool or click the letter J on your keyboard, which is the shortcut for the join tool, and click join. Then click close, and now you'll see when you click on these, I'm gonna hold shift, select both of these, and click the letter N to go to node editing. And you could see how much cleaner this actually is now.
So now there's a single node at the end point of all these corners and no extra nodes in between. So not only will this cut much cleaner, it'll also cut quicker because your machine won't make all those extra movements going around those crazy lines. So as you can see, that's a very simple way to clean up.
And like I said, it does take a little extra time, but if this is a file that you're gonna cut multiple copies of, it may be worth it. And if it's a file that you want to be nice and clean, you may wanna spend that extra time to do that. And finally, let's do a quick comparison from the original turn on the visibility of that, and let's go out of our node edit mode and we can hide that guideline as well.
And you can see these overlapping right here. The red line is the original, and you'll see how messy that point is. And then all the corners you'll see are way off. So the black line is the new line that we just fixed. So as you can see, we'll have a much cleaner carving from that result. And we can turn off our new one, look at the original, and then turn off the original and look at the new one.
And just to note as well, once you get into arcs or curves, it'll get a little bit more complicated like this letter R here. Uh, but what I recommend doing is if you have a sharp point here, you want a little bit smoother. What I would do is delete these points right here, and then I usually drag these points down a little bit further and out here a little further.
And right now this is a smooth curve. You could tell by these handles here. So you can drag this out, or you can right click on it and switch it to an arc, and you'll see now it'll be a perfect arc, and then you could just drag these end points to make it smoother and drag the arc out or in if you need to.
And you'll see now that looks much smoother with no sharp points like you see right here, there's a little bit of a sharp point. And also the arc usually cuts a little bit faster than the smooth curve does, depending on your machine. And also, one other thing I should point out is right now we have this switch to an arc.
So if you ever had an arc corner that you wanted to be square, an easier way instead of deleting it and using the extend tool, is you can actually use the fillet tool. So in the edit objects there's the fillet tool. And if you just go to a normal, fillet, and if you hover over the arc, you'll see a little X on the cursor.
Just click on that arc and you'll see it'll automatically be switched to a square corner. So that's another trick to square up corners if they happen to be an arc. And then we can always do edit undo to bring it back. Okay, so hopefully those tips help you out and if they did, make sure you like and subscribe for more.
So you can see that letter A has really nice, sharp corners, and this will give you nice clean carves when you go to carve these objects. All right, you can see to get started, I just imported an image that I'm going to Bitmap Trace, and this is my logo here. So we're gonna go to the Trace Bitmap tool and I'm gonna start off with all the default settings and just click preview.
And you could see if you zoom in, you will notice that some of these corners are going to be cut off a little bit. They're not gonna be nice, sharp corners. And that generally happens, uh, when you use the Trace Bitmap tool, you'll see some of them will be okay, like this letter E looks really good, but some of them, like the letter A you'll see will be a little bit messed up.
So that's something you want to take a look at. And there is an option here that says Corner Fit. And you could make those loose or tight, and I'll show you what that will do. So you want to pay attention to corners like this with a nice, smooth arc. And then also the sharp corners so if we make the corner fit all the way up to a very tight fit and click preview.
That may make some of the tighter corners better, but you could see we still have some messed up corners. But you'll see for the arch corners, it's gonna make those a little bit more messy. So there is a fine line there, you don't want to go too tight because if you have round corners, that will mess those up.
So I'm gonna switch that back to default and click preview and you'll see that will smoothen that out some. And even if you went, uh, to a looser setting and click preview, it'll smoothen out even more. So I generally go with the default unless it looks terrible and I just want to change it more. So you wanna play around with those settings, but we're gonna start off here and click apply and then close.
And now we have a simple traced bitmap. And you can go ahead and use these vectors and start making a toolpath, and you'll be fine with that. But you will notice that your carves may be a little bit messy because these vectors are messy. So it all depends on how clean of a carve you want in the end. But this will take a little extra time to clean up, but it'll definitely make your carves much better in the results.
So this is gonna be up to you if you wanna spend this little extra time to clean up your files. Now with texts like this, you could probably just replace the text using the text tool, but you're not always gonna have that option if it's a design. So I will show you how you can clean those corners up very easily using one single tool.
So we're gonna focus on this letter A. And before we do this, I'm going to select all of the vectors by drawing a selection box around that and then just hold shift and deselect the picture. And then I'm gonna right click on the vectors and click copy to layer. And I'm gonna make a backup copy so we can see the difference that we make in our changes.
So I'm gonna go to a new layer and I'll just leave it layer two. I'll make it red and I'm gonna make it not visible, so it's going to be hidden for right now and click okay. And now we can focus on these original vectors. So I'm only gonna focus on the letter A for this example, just to save the time from doing the entire file.
But you'll see these techniques you can use for the entire file. So what I like to do is select all the vectors that I want to edit. So I will select all the shapes surrounding this letter A, and then I click the letter N to go to the node editing. And this letter A will be very simple because it's all straight lines, so there's no arcs or curves that we have to deal with.
So the way this should be set up is having one single node in each corner, and there should be no nodes in the middle of these lines. So what I like to do to clean this up is first delete the nodes in between the end points. So I'm just gonna hover over that node and click the letter D to delete it. And I will delete any nodes that do not fall on a corner, just like that.
And then we're gonna come down here to a corner and you don't want to delete this node, uh, because it will move this angled line. So what I do instead is delete this span. So I just hover over the span and click the letter D to delete it. And I'm going to fix this later with the tool that I'll show you in a second.
Okay, and then we're gonna come over to this one and let's delete any nodes in between here, just like this. And you'll see that one just messed up there so I will click undo, and instead of deleting that node, I will delete this span. Zoom in a little bit and click the letter D to delete that span and that leaves that line there for reference of the angle that it's at.
And then I would delete this node right here. And your whole goal here is you want the angled line to stay there, but we want the corners removed that we're gonna clean up later. So this corner here, we'll delete that. This corner here will delete that span. And I will show you if you were to delete the node instead, you couldn't do that, but you're gonna have a harder time getting that exact angle.
So you'll see if I delete this node, it's going to move to this node and it will change the angle a little bit. So you could just take this node and drag it back out, but you kind of have to eyeball it wherever you wanna put it there. So that is an option to do that. Uh, that will work just fine, but I'll show you the other option we're gonna use will get these corners more exact.
So I'm gonna edit, undo that, and then delete just the span in the corner by clicking the letter D while hovering over the uh, line span there. And then the center portion, I'm going to delete all the crazy lines up here, leaving that corner open. I'll delete this node that's in the middle there, and then I'll delete this corner here, leaving that open.
Okay, and that's what I would do is just go around the entire file and delete all the corners that are messed up and any nodes in between. And you can see already, this is looking a lot cleaner. Uh, one thing I may do up here too, you see that line is a little bit of an angle, so you could drag this down a little bit to straighten it up.
You can also drag a guideline down, snap it to one end, and that will give you an exact horizontal line you can snap to and that will clean that up a lot there. Okay, so now we just have to fix all of these corners. And to do that is just one single tool and it's in the edit objects menu here, and it's called Extend.
So we're gonna click on that. And you see there's no options in this tool. All you have to do is go right on the screen, click two lines that you want to extend, and they'll meet at a common point where they intersect. So we're gonna click the end of this line and the end of this line, and you'll see they'll connect at the intersection point.
So you see this is very easy to use. Just click two lines that intersect at a point, and you'll see all the corners will be nice and sharp. And you go around the entire file, just clicking the ends of both lines. And you'll see sometimes, right now you see it's not letting me select this. So if that does happen, just close down the tool, open it back up, and just select it in the opposite order.
And that usually will fix it. All right, looks like I got all the corners just by clicking the two ends, and then click close. Now, the final step here is you may have to join these back together. You'll see if you had multiple open ends, it may not join all the lines back together. So right now, these are all open vectors, so what you want to do is select the entire shape by drawing a selection box around it.
And then go to the join tool or click the letter J on your keyboard, which is the shortcut for the join tool, and click join. Then click close, and now you'll see when you click on these, I'm gonna hold shift, select both of these, and click the letter N to go to node editing. And you could see how much cleaner this actually is now.
So now there's a single node at the end point of all these corners and no extra nodes in between. So not only will this cut much cleaner, it'll also cut quicker because your machine won't make all those extra movements going around those crazy lines. So as you can see, that's a very simple way to clean up.
And like I said, it does take a little extra time, but if this is a file that you're gonna cut multiple copies of, it may be worth it. And if it's a file that you want to be nice and clean, you may wanna spend that extra time to do that. And finally, let's do a quick comparison from the original turn on the visibility of that, and let's go out of our node edit mode and we can hide that guideline as well.
And you can see these overlapping right here. The red line is the original, and you'll see how messy that point is. And then all the corners you'll see are way off. So the black line is the new line that we just fixed. So as you can see, we'll have a much cleaner carving from that result. And we can turn off our new one, look at the original, and then turn off the original and look at the new one.
And just to note as well, once you get into arcs or curves, it'll get a little bit more complicated like this letter R here. Uh, but what I recommend doing is if you have a sharp point here, you want a little bit smoother. What I would do is delete these points right here, and then I usually drag these points down a little bit further and out here a little further.
And right now this is a smooth curve. You could tell by these handles here. So you can drag this out, or you can right click on it and switch it to an arc, and you'll see now it'll be a perfect arc, and then you could just drag these end points to make it smoother and drag the arc out or in if you need to.
And you'll see now that looks much smoother with no sharp points like you see right here, there's a little bit of a sharp point. And also the arc usually cuts a little bit faster than the smooth curve does, depending on your machine. And also, one other thing I should point out is right now we have this switch to an arc.
So if you ever had an arc corner that you wanted to be square, an easier way instead of deleting it and using the extend tool, is you can actually use the fillet tool. So in the edit objects there's the fillet tool. And if you just go to a normal, fillet, and if you hover over the arc, you'll see a little X on the cursor.
Just click on that arc and you'll see it'll automatically be switched to a square corner. So that's another trick to square up corners if they happen to be an arc. And then we can always do edit undo to bring it back. Okay, so hopefully those tips help you out and if they did, make sure you like and subscribe for more.
