"Random" texture

[benchmark]

Gerald, I will take that as a compliment !!

Sorry for the delay in replying but I am extremely busy at the moment. The picture above was done with Artcam with a raster in X which is extremely slow and does not have a very good finish unless you have very small stepover.

I have done some short arc per "facet" with Enroute Pro ( I do not use it at present as I have not upgraded it to work beyond Win98)

I will try to find the old files for you....How urgent is it ?

Steve, when I find the DXF files it should work with Vcarve.


Paul

[gerald_d]

Not urgent at all - I am trying to build up a library of textures to show prospective clients. Thanks for the time so far.

[Brian Moran]

Hi ,
you can achieve similar results to the ‘adze’ texture by v-carving lots of overlapping, variable sized ovals using a ball nose tool. However, as v-carving only works with non-overlapping vectors you have to select sub sets of the vectors carefully and create toolpaths for non-overlapping sections. You will also get a ‘double’ toolpath as the v-carving will move down the centre of the ovals and back again.

There are a number of drawbacks to this approach other than the doubled up toolpath segment. The biggest is that creating variations on the texture involves drawing new sets of geometry, others include speed and the large number of toolpaths which may need to be generated for the different non-overlaping sections.

With this in mind we have been playing with an approach similar to Gerald’s suggestion of using ‘random’ perturbations of the toolpath sections. The first results from this are shown below and I think the textures look very interesting and will machine MUCH more efficiently than trying to machine a ‘3d relief’ of the texture with a relatively small ball nose tool. The toolpath for this texture consists of single passes for each ‘segment’ of the texture. We had planned to incorporate this feature into VCarve Wizard 3.5, but if there is enough interest we may look at bringing it forward into VCW 3.0 (VCW 3.0 will be free to all existing users).


13060.jpg

13061.jpg

13062.jpg

13063.jpg

The top two images were created with a ball nose tool, the second two with a vbit. The 2nd and 4th images show the result of combining two texturing toolpaths at different angles, which creates some very cool effects.

The toolpaths above were created and simulated in less than 5 seconds on my machine, and varying the parameters is very simple and a lot of fun!

Hope these are of interest

Brian

[paco]

Hey Brian!

I would really like to benefit this feature as soon as possible! It look good! I'm interested.

[evan]

Brian,
To paraphrase Gerald "Woof woof"
and quote Paco "It look good! I'm interested."
Bring it on, the sooner the better.

[gerald_d]

While the minds are churning out in Redditch.....

How about applying some "random-ness" to this perfectly square grid pattern:


13066.jpg

The above has little square patterns replicating in a 2 inch grid (for example). What if that grid was made of wavy lines so that the 2" dimension varies from 1.7 to 2.3 inches. Macro-randomness to a detail pattern.....

I am thinking maybe even to take the typical V-Carve inputs (even scans) and then "morph" them a bit. Remember the computer tricks where you can look at someone's photo on the screen, click on their nose and drag it around a bit?.....

Taking that sample pic above, could one click and drag sections so that x,y cords are "distorted" but z stays constant.....

[benchmark]

Another

Created with Vcarve....the small flate can be removed with setting zero just below the surface


13073.jpg

[patricktoomey]

Would anybody be interested in a program to build optimized ShopBot toolpath files for various textures? Besides being a relatively new 'bothead I'm also a long time programmer and this thread has me intrigued. I could pretty quickly whip up an application that would build some textures like these and let us configure things like depth, stroke length, randomness, etc. Then it could build the tool paths as efficiently as possible. If there is enough interest I'll build something for everyone to play with. (Note: anything I build for shop botters will be free of charge, I learn so much from all of you by reading these forums it's the least I can do.)

[normand]

Gerald you could tesselate your tiles.

[gerald_d]

tesselate..... are we allowed to do that on a public forum?

Hi Normand, that is the word I was looking for when I first mentioned the tiles - I had to look it up to understand. tessellate

More examples of texturing