I’m having trouble with what I thought would be a super simple piece of artwork in Estlcam. The problem isn’t Estlcam exactly but I’m hoping someone might know how I can work around it. I’ll attach the DXF if anyone wants to play around with it.
I’m using Adobe Illustrator to create the artwork and in that, using the Pathfinder “Minus Front” tool to cut the S away from the underlying C and then putting the S back. In all my life working with Illustrator I’ve known tis method to be petty precise. But not this time. Estlcam was alerting me to gaps that it couldn’t interpret or handle. And sure enough when you zoom in you can see them. I thought maybe it was something to do with the DXF file export so I went back to Illustrator and sure enough, there it was. I was quite surprised.
So the question is - Estlcam seems to suggest you can “draw” your own points in, which I tried, but with less than great result. Does anyone know a “fix on the fly” for this in Estlcam?
I tried resolving it in Illustrator by scaling the artwork up from the 2" x 2" size (it’s an ice cube of course) to 2 feet by 2 feet and redoing the Minus Front operation and while it was way more accurate, it still wasn’t dead-on and Estlcam picked up the gaps.
Now, I also tried not being all fancy with the artwork and bringing the full letterforms into Estlcam and while I did not get any errors, I can’t seem to “do” what I’m hoping to “do” here - see illustration of the end goal. I’ll include that DXF file as well.
I opened your drawings and maybe I understood what’s happening to you.
At the point marked by EstlCAM with a circle and an exclamation mark it seems that the two tracks overlap and therefore EstlCAM doesn’t know which one to follow.
There is a way to manually follow the track, but I have never used it and therefore I am not able to suggest how to do it.
However, I modified the DXFs by removing the double lines (see attachment).
I hope I have solved the problem.
All you have to do is try and hope it works.
Make good shavings!!! SC-DXFs-1.zip (33.0 KB)
Two objects are needed for stacked text, the S (Start level = 0) and a SC (Start level = bottom of S) outline (Path Union in Inkscape)… I confirmed that the DXF works fine in Estlcam (SVG didn’t, removed).
Thanks for that. Did you just manually edit the overlapping line segments to fix it up? It now occurs to me that a guy could actually delete one of the two pieces causing issues and copy and paste the other for an exact duplicate.
Estlecam is a basic piece of software. There is no editing of imported images. To get rid of the overlap you need to go back to the graphic program then reload the new image into ecam.
The on the fly fix is to manually select which path you want it to take. Just zoom in and you’ll see a bunch of nodes.
