Hi All,
Would anyone be able to give me a example file from Vcarve in DXF format? Can be anything at all.
I’m trying to figure out if I can use sketchup and fabber to make clean DXF parts for my CNC software. Unfortunately Vcarve doesn’t work with our CNC and it has to go through a specific software for toolpathing which is autocad based hence requiring either DWG or DXF.
My workflow would be Sketchup>Fabber>Vcarve export>My CNC software.
That workflow will be just fine. Fabber creates SVG files which are then sent to VCarve. From there you can export that as DXF if you want. Or, if you wanted to simplify the workflow you could see if your CNC software supports SVG import…
Thanks Eric,
Sadly even the latest autocad (and my autocad 2007 based cnc software) doesn’t import SVG’s,
The export from fabber to Vcarve looks good but the DXF export is disabled in the vcarve trial. I’d have to buy a full license to see if the export would play nice with my CNC software. Ouch!
You can use Inkscape to do this for free… (Inkscape is free) just open the SVG and then SaveAs as a DXF and you’re all set!
I’ve had a play around with inkscape and have discovered a few things -
When importing the fabber SVG it seems to mess up the scale.
All the geometry is on layer 1 (No other layers).
When saving as DXF and opening in autocad the circles are splines and outside lines / dados and exploded to single lines.
To be fair to fabber I imported the same SVG into the Vcarve trial and everthing looks good.
Using Inkscape can be a little dicey… It’s really not meant for cutting out vectors… Why not just import our SVG into VCarve and export to DXF from there? That should work fine…
I found some scaling issues too. But, I exported with Fabber set to “Export to: Adobe Illustrator” and converted it to a dxf using Inkscape with default settings. I was then able to import to Alphacam with no scale issues.
This thread explains what you ran into nicely:
Glad you got it going!