My first CNC artwork

[Jeff Shepard]

I'm new to CNC art and am learning every day so here are the first projects that I have done and cut out using my Fireball V90. My Nephew is a Junior at Amador Valley High School and plays on the Varsity Baseball team, so I am making him a Graduation Emblem. My other Nephew is a Giants fan so I made him a Giants logo....and the Wine Barrel is for me. It was my first project and my first attempt at making a relief from a vector drawing. I used AutoCAD and Artcam to do all of these projects...oh and a little bit of Corel Draw to get rid of all the color vectors in the grapes....there were thousands of little circles...

The Amador Emblem was hand drawn in AutoCAD and then reliefed in Artcam.

[bobsch]

Nice pieces. And you're new to CNC? I'm impressed!

[Jeff Shepard]

Ok...I just finished the Amador Valley Logo...it took 8 hours to cut out. There has to be a faster way to cut. I cut this out of Poplar and just put a coat of Polyurethane on it...I did lightly sand it with 400 grit sand paper first. I tried out some stain on some scrap and did not like how it took the stain so I left it how god made it. I think it looks like it was cut from the same stuff baseball bats are made of. Any ideas on how I can make it cut faster...it has to do with the z-axis speed I think.

[quazga]

Very impressive!

A small tip I could offer would be to try Zrush. Once you have it where you've got it, you can import it into Zbrush as an obj file and then sculpt it. The leaves for example look great! However, if you were to bring it into Zbrush you could subdivide it to a million polygons or so and then sculpt those leaves into more natural looking forms and then decimate back down to one hundred thousand polygons or so and export as a stl or obj file. You can see some of my 3D bas relief sculpts here.

[twoartistic]

Very nice.

What kind of milling tool did you use. I have found one of the problems with artcam is that the tool path is being generated by a raster image. To do fine work such as your carvings the software is literally looking at each pixel and creating toolpath geometry to carve each pixel. This causes a huge amount of unnecessary stair stepping in the z line of code, and results in extended cutting times (thousands of small starts and stops, instead of smooth transitions).

Several ways to solve this, give a greater value in the tolerance command. Use a round nose mill, or rounded edge mill (the toolpath generator cannot put a round tool into the individual pixel flats). And finally my favorite, put your g-code into an editor, (I use open office spreadsheet) and do an averaging of the z line of code. By writing a formula that averages a few lines of z code, it will cause the tool to trend in the desired direction, without the stair stepping up and down inlines in the part. I have used this method with great success. Play with it, you can average as few as a 3 line spread, or I have averaged up to 30 line spreads (when the tool path is nearly coplanar to the surface of the part) and completely removed any unnecessary up and down z travel. The only downside of averaging the code, it that it will change the depth of cut slightly over the peaks, and valleys of your parts. For my purposes I have never seen a variation of more that 0.005". And lets face it, if its wood, the humidity of your breath will raise the grain more than that. lol

Here is some of my work, if you want to see how my programming has turned out.
http://animoto.com/play/VDBnTdYkQziDndNhpXsm4g