Originally Posted by
BillYoung
Hey Jeff,
We made skateboards at the Maker Faire in NY last fall and had a very similar problem with projecting the profile cut onto the model of the board. I am 3-dimensionally challenged so asked Brian Moran of Vectric if he had any suggestions...this was his reply:
"The problem occurs because you have a pretty low resolution for the 3D model within VCarve. You have ‘Standard’ resolution set for the model on the Job Setup form which uses about 1,000,000 points. On your job this leads to a resolution of about 1220 x 814. The 1220 pixels in X translates to a pixel size of about 0.030” or 0.75mm in real money. When we drop the tool onto the model during the projection process there are relatively few ‘pixels’ under the tool, so it picks up the same Z value for quite a range of XY positions. This is what is giving the ‘steps’ in the toolpath – what you have are a series of XY moves which should have a continuously changing Z component but instead we have a series of discrete Z values repeated across multiple moves.
The easy way to improve this is simply to increase the model resolution you are working with. For a 36” job when modelling we would recommend using at least the “Very High (7 x Slower)” setting for model resolution. We would also recommend restricting the job size to just the area you are working on so that all the ‘pixels’ are used in the area in which you actually have a model. For your job the area being projected was only 36” x 11” but the workpiece was 36” x 24” in effect wasting half the resolution.
There are some even higher resolutions which can only be accessed by holding down the Shift key when starting a new model or going back into the Job Setup form. For your job I would have picked the highest of these – “Maximum (50 x Slower)” and doing this pretty much removes the jaggies. You can do this on your existing file and we will resample and interpolate the new pixel data from the model you have already imported. For the very best results it is a 1 minute job to extrude your shape within Aspire using the 2 rail sweep and not bother with importing triangulated models at all "
Hope this helps,
Bill