Best signmaking setup

[ssanda@nvbell.net]

OK, I've down a little homework here in prep for our shopbot which is on order. We are a small sign shop and want to offer an alternative to sandblasted signs which are 2d signs. So, mostly 2d letter carving, hogging out, v-bit carving small (less than 3") type and some 3d accents (like borders, objects (like a trout, for instance) that can be appliqued on one sign.

I think I should still design in coreldraw as I can quickly and easily create and print out color roughs, proofs and design prsentations, right?

Upon receiving the job I can convert type to curves, convert all objects to lines without fill and export as a dxf, right?

For the 2d carving I could import the dxf into Turbocad (or what?) and create the toolpaths, hog-outs and bit offsets, right?

I would do the 2d carving job seperately from the v-bit carving because of the bit change (and v-bit carving specific software), correct?

Next I would create my trout in a 3d modeling program (even a crude trout would be better than my hand carving skills and quaint, besides). I would export that to Millwizard (millwizard.com) and create that, right?

This approach would be the quickest, easiest and most efficient (money-making) way to approach this job, right?

Then I would finish, assemble and collect the check, right?

Thanks for your comments in advance as I haven't seen a specific project discussed from start to finish yet.

[RgEngrave@aol.com]

I think I should still design in coreldraw as I can quickly and easily create and print out color roughs, proofs and design presentations, right?

MOST CAD PROGRAMS WILL LET YOU USE FILL COLORS AND LET YOU PRINT IT

Upon receiving the job I can convert type to curves, convert all objects to lines without fill and export as a dxf, right?

WHEN USING COREL YOU HAVE TO DO 1 OF 2 THINGS FIRST
1. SAVE THE FILE AS A CDR, THE REOPEN IT THEN EXPORT AS A DXF OR

2. DRAW THE FILE AND SELECT ALL AND CONVERT TO CURVES, YOU MIGHT HAVE TO EXPLODE IT FIRST?.

I USED CORELDRAW 8-9-10 AND HAVE DIFFERENT RESULTS WITH THE SAME FILE EVERY TIME.

IF YOU HAVE TURBOCAD I WOULD USE THAT TO DRAW YOUR FILE, YOU WILL NOT HAVE TO CONVERT TO CURVES, YOU WOULD ONLY NEED TO USE THE SPLINE TOOL THEN JUST SELECT WHAT YOU DREW WITH THE SPLINE TOOL AND EXPLODE IT OR JUST USE THE MULTILINE TOOL AND YOU WILL NOT HAVE TO EXPLODE ANYTHING, THIS WILL SET THE CUTTING ORDER TOO.


For the 2d carving I could import the dxf into Turbocad (or what?) and create the toolpaths, hog-outs and bit offsets, right?

YOU COULD DO THAT, YOU WOULD GO TO EDIT-COPY ENTITIES- OFFSET, YOU WOULD FIRST SELECT A LINE THEN TYPE IN THE SIZE OF THE BIT YOU WILL BE USING AND HIT ENTER, THEN CLICK THE OUTSIDE OF THE LINE AND IT WILL OFFSET IT, THEN JUST DELETE THE INNER LINE.

AS FOR ISLAND OR HATCHING, BEST TO USE A CAD/CAM PROGRAM FOR THAT, IF YOU ORDERED A MACHINE? I THINK VECTOR COMES WITH IT? CHECK WITH SHOPBOT TO SEE.

YOU WILL OPEN THE DXF FILE IN VECTOR AND CAN DO A ISLAND OR HATCH WITHIN THE PROGRAM THEN JUST USE THE SB DRIVER FOR VECTOR TO MAKE YOUR SBP FILE

I would do the 2d carving job separately from the v-bit carving because of the bit change (and v-bit carving specific software), correct?

THE WAY I DO IT IS DRAW YOUR FILE,
LETS SAY YOU DREW A RECTANGLE AND IN IT YOU HAVE TEXT AND YOU WANT TO USE A V-BIT TO CUT THE TEXT AND A DIFFERENT BIT TO CUT THE RECTANGLE.

FIRST DRAW THE RECTANGLE AND SIZE IT, THEN SAVE AS A DXF AS CUT1.DXF.

NEXT YOU WILL PUT IN YOUR TEXT INSIDE THE RECTANGLE, SIZE THE TEXT AND PLACE IT WITHIN THE RECTANGLE WHERE YOU WANT IT, THEN DELETE THE RECTANGLE AND SAVE AS CUT2.DXF.

NOW ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS RUN THE 2 FILE TO COMPLETE YOUR WORK.

IF YOU WERE TO USE THE SAME ROUTER BIT FOR BOTH, YOU COULD USE JUST 1 FILE AND CHANGE THE COLOR OF 1 OF THEM, THE WHEN YOU CONVERT IT TO A SBP FILE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ENTER THE DEPTH FOR EACH COLOR.

Next I would create my trout in a 3d modeling program (even a crude trout would be better than my hand carving skills and quaint, besides). I would export that to Millwizard (millwizard.com) and create that, right?

EASY SAID THEN DONE, I HAVE HAD MILLWIZARD FOR MONTHS NOW AND YOU WILL NEED TO ENTER THE RIGHT SETTINGS, I SEE NO CONTROL OF THIS UNLESS YOU WERE TO DO THE 3D FILE FIRST THEN GO BACK AD DRAW A FILE WITH THE SIZE MILLWIZARD CUT, THIS WAY IT WILL LAY OUT THE WAY YOU WANT.

This approach would be the quickest, easiest and most efficient (money-making) way to approach this job, right?

THIS WOULD BE A 50-50? DOING 2D FILES TAKES MINUTES DEPENDING ON THE DETAIL AND THE SIZE OF THE FILE AND 3D WILL TAKES HOURS, IF YOU ARE GOING TO DO 3D WORK BETTER SET THE PRICE FOR MACHINE TIME.

Then I would finish, assemble and collect the check, right?

[bill.young]

Rick,

I don't use Corel so I'm not speaking from experience, but graphics programs aren't designed for the type of drawing that you need to do for ShopBot cutting. I would certainly take Ron's opinion on this; if he says it's problematic, I'll bet it is.

Here's my suggestion; take it for what it's worth. Draw your borders and embellishments in a CAD program, then bring them into Vector to do your toolpaths, offsets, etc. Like Ron I use TurboCAD, like it a lot, and it seems to work well with Vector and the ShopBot dxf convertor. Version 4.1 is the best in my opinion, and the one I use 99% of the time, but they say the new version 7 is pretty stable also. Just about any CAD program will do almost everything you need to do, so my suggestion is to pick one and stick with it.

I think you'll also want some sign-specific software to do the centerline trace and 3d hand-carved looking work. Can't help you there, but Bill Palumbo is at the Sign Show in Atlantic City and hopefully will be able to give us some info on software next week.

The 3d work has a STEEP learning curve, especially with arty and sculptural things like a trout. I personally think Rhino is the best and easiest to use, and you can download a full-featured demo from them at www.rhino3d.com, but I would also look into 3d clipart and see if you can buy what you want instead of creating it; I think you would be ahead of the game. My experience has been that Millwizard works well with Rhino, but they all take some tweaking.

Hope this helps,

Bill Young

[swims@mindspring.com]

Hi Rick,

I come from an art and sign shop background and I'll have to disagree with Bill re: CorelDraw. When you get away from an intensive graphics based program such as Coreldraw you will lose, among many other things, all of the subtle kerning control that is built in. If you are used to CorelDraw you will NOT be completely happy with the text based functions in engineering and machine shop based programs such as Turbocad, Vector, or even Vfontz.

I use CorelDraw8 on a Mac for all of my text 'sketching' and quite a bit of my original design work and use Vector for creating the toolpaths associated with those designs. The 'problems' concerning conversion to .dxf are quite small compared to the flexibility of the software and the high level of productivity you can maintain because of your familiarity with it.

My 2¢.

Steve Williams

[danhamm@abccom.bc.ca]

It seems corel is getting some more bad press..
I use coreldraw for all the engraving machines
we have rotary, lasers, and shopbot now as well,
The only thing you have to convert to "curves is the
TT Fonts " you don't have to save to cdr. you export as dxf and convert with the shopbot coverter, The square drawing and circle funtion of coreldraw used with the contouring and trim
function works very well for pocketing and raised
lettering .. the only problem we have found is video cards.. we have four independent workstations 1 using a ATI wondepro rage card .. exporting from corel as dxf adds some tearing to the file.. my 2bits Dan H

[RgEngrave@aol.com]

Bill and Steve both have good points, to best answer all your questions it might help us if we knew what programs you have? or what you are looking to get?, we can them post the methods it will take to complete your project.

If you are going to be a new shopbotter and new to cad programs? I would follow this tips.

Before buying a cad program I would see what most shopbotters are using first, this is what I call a life saver.

If 50% of them are using "BRAND A" you will be able to get all the help you will need and only 1 way of doing it, this saves you all the confusion.

I started out buy using Autocad 14 to make my files, then moved to Coreldraw 8 because it took less work to draw them, then moved to Turbocad because it was so simple to use, so you see how it will change.

I have tried many cad programs but in the end I use Turbocad 98% of the time.

As for 3D I would get with Paul Neilson on this, he is the only one I know out of hundreds that has made and cut many 3d files.

Ron

[RgEngrave@aol.com]

What might work on 1 verison of Coreldraw might not work on the next? I have 4 thru 9 and used the same file on all of them and got 5 diffent cuts, the same goes for Turbocad, what I can do on verison 5 3D does not work on verison 6.5.

Go figure, I did find out that it has a lot to do with what verison of the dxf converter you use.

Ron

[danhamm@abccom.bc.ca]

Just a little hunch, we have all ver. of corel we are beta testers..3-10 plus the new linux ver..
we use 7 - 8 on different stations if you load 2
versions of corel on 1 station the last one loaded
has its ver. corelapp.ini-- you would get strange results when exporting a file from a later ver.
We don't use 9 or 10 the lasers divers don't work
well with them yet..

[RgEngrave@aol.com]

I knew there had to be an answer why it was doing that, thanks for the info.

Ron

[ssanda@nvbell.net]

Ron, Bill, Steve, Dan, thanks a bunch for spending the time to explain all that- I feel my "software anxiety" easing!

To clarify: Sign selling for us is an extremely graphic thing- we take a digital of a storefront and superimpose a realistic rendering of the sign on it to show exactly what the sign will look like installed. Can you do that with a CAD program- I don't know- haven't used Autocad since 1989. I've used Corel for 10 years so can whip out a design pretty quick with it also.

We use it with a bridge program (CasMate Cut) to cut vinyl and with a really wonderful driver to run our laser engraver. So if I could keep using it and use other programs to "fill in the blanks" I can stay really efficient.

Our laser (Universal 25 watt) is designed around the HP plotter model and the driver was designed with CorelDraw in mind. It really works seamlessly like a printer driver for vector cutting and raster engraving. It seems to me that programmer could easily modify it to work with the Shopbot.

Thanks again for the help!

[danhamm@abccom.bc.ca]

Rick I also have uls.laser and a home built,
I also had the same response and thoughts about
the cutting and engraving, "but" the laser has a built in converter for just about any file you can
throw at it, not just coreldraw, it will work with any windows graphical program..just like a printer..and its that 3rd movement thats a killer..some of the rotary engraver programs will
raster engrave ,using coreldraw, But they can't handle 3d movements they sound like a buzz saw and do little steps that don't look good..
I have gone back to the ver.4.01 driver for the uls. laser not as good for mixed work better for
photo engraving .. Dan H.

[bwclark@centurytel.net]

Rick,

I gota put my $.02 in here. If you are
comfortable with Corel Draw, then stick with it.
While I do not use Corel Draw, I do know that
Vector CAD/CAM (comes with your ShopBot) will
allow direct cutting and pasting between programs.
While I have not verified this, the Vector CAD
manual devotes a large section to this.

So, you could do your drawing in Corel, paste it
into Vector to generate any 3D moves you need and
tool bit offsets. Use Vector's ShopBot driver to
output a ShopBot file.

Also, another alternative (besides the DXF option)
is that ShopBot includes an HPGL to ShopBot
converter, so you could even user your current
laser driver to generate Shopbot files.

Hope this helps,

Bruce Clark
bwclark@centurytel.net (mailto:bwclark@centurytel.net)

[bill.young]

Rick,

As you can see from the responses, there are lots of ways to accomplish the same thing. Since you are comfortable with Corel and have lots of experience with it, I would stick with it.

Good luck,

Bill Young

[garbob]

Bill Young, Re: Rhino and Mill Wizard
When you say "Rhino works well with Mill Wizard", what do you mean. Can you design in Rhino and have Mill Wizard create the tool paths?

I just downloaded Rhino, and , it's amazing. There are actual tutorials that work. WOW. I was just wondering how you get from a Rhino model to a cut file!

[bill.young]

Gary,

I've done a couple of projects in Rhino and used Mill Wizard to create the toolpath, and it worked quite well. There was a little bit of head-scratching in the beginning trying to get the settings right in Mill Wizard, but there didn't seem to be any compatability issues at all. Mill Wizard can open .3ds, .dxf, and .stl files; I used .3ds

Rhino is an amazing program, and if you're a student it goes from $800 to somewhere in the $200-300 range. I haven't used it nearly enough to get very good at it, but I have customers that use it exclusively and swear by it. I know Ron Brown has been using Rhino a lot recently, he might be able to give you better feedback than I can.

Bill

[ssanda@nvbell.net]

This info along with Bob Neitze's article off the home page has really given me a good idea of what to expect when I get the machine. More importantly it has told me what programs to get familiar with in the meantime.
Thanks again.

[donchapman]

If you want to see how I'm using my ShopBot to help make 2.5-D (not true 3-D)dimensional sign models and signs, go back to ShopBot's home page, click on ShopBots in Use and then click on Model Signs.

[fuzzygrub@sinclair.net]

And back to the original trout. Well I wanted a 2.5d chinook, so after numerous hours of bondo sculpting,3d probing, countless mistakes, and murphy's law around every bend. Voila , a 58meg chinook file that is to scale. I think I'll buy a fiberglass one next time.

[billp]

Sign Show Report…
Just got back from the USSC Sign Show, and thought I'd pass on some info about some of the products which are pertinent to the Shopbot community. Before starting to write this I checked the Forum and caught up on some of the discussions that I missed over the last few days, and the threads seem to be echoing a lot of what we heard from visitors to the Shopbot booth on the exhibit floor.
Software IS the issue for many of the people in the sign industry.. Everyone wants the 'one stop' program which will handle all of their needs without having to import/export, convert, redraw, etc. But it was also obvious that there were very few people who had the same needs for these programs which is what drives software developers nuts!
Most sign makers already own expensive software packages to achieve their goals. And like many Shopbotters this can mean an array of different programs as job demands change. Shopbotters are not unique in grumbling about the state of software, yet it appears that some of that frustration seems to be spilling over into finger pointing at the machine itself, company focus, etc. In short everyone wants a highly specialized package which will do everything they want with a few mouse clicks, and it has to be foolproof, fast, easy to learn, and finally ……"affordable"….Kind of like getting Artcam the way AOL hands out their "free"700 hours CD's…
What we saw at the show was this; software IS getting better, faster, and more specific regarding the kind of work we'd all like to be doing, but at a price..In some cases it is the fact that the industry is 'packaging' their products now in ways that will benefit some users, but at a cost to others. An example in point was a conversation we had with the representatives from Scanvec/Amiable. For years Scanvec has been a leader in design software, and a lot of Shopbotters have used their products. Since teaming up with Amiable, Scanvec is now branching out a little further and trying to incorporate other facilities into their line. They have now acquired Modelmill , which is an excellent 3-D modelling/milling program, and there will soon be a consolidation with Enroute. The resulting package should be a very powerful suite which will give full 3-D, design, and milling capabilities, as well as allowing a user to do just about any kind of sign work. The downside- price. Instead of buying two $3,000 programs , it will now be a single $ 5,000 program. Pricey, yes, but it IS a solution.
Another recent entry into the field is Type 3. (www.type3.com). It's a high end design package which seems to have a lot of what people are saying they want in a program, but again these features come at a price, starting from about 3 grand ..In fact 3 grand seems to be about the median level for the "real'" software bundles..
Profilelab and Shopbot have been working on a "package' for awhile, and as stated above they can provide a lot of what people are claiming they want/need, but the real bottom line on all of these packages will be if the "ideal'package does come along, will we actually go out and buy it?
I have suggested to some other Shopbotters that there might be an interim solution for many of us who cannot justify this expense at our current level of operation. I am hoping that some of the people who bite the bullet and purchase the software will be willing/able to act as 'agencies' for the rest of us, meaning that instead of ME buying Artcam, Modelmill etc., I would create a file as far as my software will allow, and then pass it along to them for final processing. I would gladly pay a per file fee which would save me the initial expense of a major software program, and also help the purchaser to offset their expense, and amortize it faster. Then if I see I have enough work to justify a purchase myself, I would do so. I DO think there could be a "business' here for some of the people who are really more interested in the software side of things, than going out in the shop to breathe sawdust.
As far as the reaction to the PRT 96 at the show, it blew people away…The next 'competitor' in terms of price offered "special show financing" to bring their unit down to $36,000. The question we kept answering over and over again was 'why isn't your machine more expensive?". This was from a group of people who are already using, and familiar with all of the major software programs, and many of them have been running their vinyl cutting machines for years. They all recognized that the new machine was in fact more than capable to produce professional products, without having to take out a mortgage.. Many of them stated that they had been hoping Shopbot would finally start exhibiting in the Sign industry circuit, and what they saw only confirmed their thoughts that it was a "real" machine..In fact it was interesting to see how many software companies stopped by the booth to offer info, demos, and potential linkups such as Shopbot drivers for their line etc. All further indicators that the playing field is becoming more level all the time.. it will be very interesting to see what the reaction is going to be at the next major sign show, which will be in Las Vegas sometime in late March..
For those people looking for an "easy"3-D solution, I didn't see any. It is still a little esoteric, which translates into expensive at this point. As stated in other Forum messages there ARE ways to do it without all of the expense of Artcam, Modelmill etc.( and I certainly do not say that as a knock against these companies because they have DONE what people want, and probably at a great deal of R/D expense…) So as usual it comes down to whether people are willing to spend time, or cash to achieve the desired results.
As far as getting pictures of other Shopbotters, I blew it! All of us in the booth spent most of the time doing demos, answering questions, etc. There WERE at least 10 Shopbotters there, but my camera never made it out of the bag.. My apologies, I will try again at the next major event.. Bill P.

[garbob]

Bill, Thanks for the update. On the subject of software: I would be willing to pay thousands of dollars for a package that has one solution for 2 and 3 d design/cad/cam software with some sign functions. I have "browsed" most packages out there and have yet to see anything that I could actually use out of the box. I have very little cad experience, BUT, the lack of or incorrect documentation on all packages that I have looked at scares the heck out of me. I find C.A.S. (computer aided sign) packages the worst followed by all cad/cam packages. These people want the money for the product but they think that documentation is not a part of that product. I'm at a loss. Fortunately I think that the new players are going to blow the old farts (read "the established community software companies") out of the water. I'm already seeing this in vertical market P.O.S. software. The notable exception to all of the crummy packages that I have seen is RHINO. WOW. Documentation, working demo, internet forums with links to help and working tutorials. I'm impressed. Sorry for the verbosity!