Version 3.0

[John T]

Hi Art,
I've managed to cut my first florish and I'm really pleased, its a great addition to my box of tricks.

This florish is 4 inches by 3 inches and is cut 0.17 inches deep in MDF with a 1/32 inch end mill.  The file is 62,305 lines of Gcode.  The Gcode was generated with Aspire (glorified vCarve program).

I do have one question and that is about scale.  The original dxf as produced by the wizard is really big and while I could scale it down to 4" by 3" quite easily,  I was wondering if there was a set up to have it generated to a smaller scale.  I would probably lose some definition right?

John

[ArtF]

John:

  Looks great. :)

On scale, you dont actually lose detail on any scaling, the dxf is good to several decimal places so it
handles scale well.  When EPS is out perhaps the scaling will be better as the eps format has a bit better
control I think.. so far anyway.. Im still coding on the new outputs..

Art

[Mooselake]

I ran my smiling moose self portrait through the photo flourish generator, dinked around with it a bit, and created my first flourish.

Wonder if it can be massaged a bit more and turned into an stl file?   Either that, or install the new parts into the laser and engrave it instead.

Kirk

[ArtF]

Kirk:

  Havent decided yet how to make it an stl, I have some experiments to run on some sort of auto 3d gradient fill
to make it 3d.. ot I could make it tubular.. future work I think, I obsessed on the flourishes too long as it is. :)

  You can actually draw exclusion zones and such in the flourish guide box, Ill show that in the next video.. well,
the one after the next as Im finishing up a video on the bat to answer all the questions I keep getting on it. :)

Art

[Mooselake]

Not a big deal, but V(ish) shaped flourishes, both up for printing directly, and down for (the equivalent of) engraving, would be cool too if you ever get back to them.  Until then there's openSCAD extrusions.  Mrs. Moose is complaining the project list is too long and I'm not getting enough done for her anyway.

Kirk

[Mooselake]

Completely coincidentally, one of our unofficial Printrbot forum members, another programmer, has been working on a project to convert hand drawn objects to 3D stl files.  He ran my moose flourish through his code, with some trouble since the image I saved was too low a resolution.  I did another one (unfortunately I didn't record or remember the first one's settings) at higher resolution and also included the dxf file.  You can see the results in the link.  There's some interesting interpretations of the flourish in the topic, although it still looks like a moose to me.

Kirk

[ArtF]

Very Nice,your friends algorithms sweep is a great use for that type of vector.
May be a nice future feature , the ability to extrude to stl.. Im considering
it for inclusion, in reality the code is all there to allow for stl from vector.

Art

[John T]

Hi Art
Pretty fancy clock faces are now easy to create - many thanks.

John

[BobL]

Looks good John..

[Dan Mauch]

I d/led the latest version of V3.0 and installed it with no problem. I watched the video a couple times and then ran V3. I had no problem until I got to testing the florish module. The florish modules loads OK and I create box around the grid but when I clicked on florish again I kept getting a error messages that florish layer not found. Simply closing the program and reopening didn't work. But today I tried it again and now it works. What I think happened is that after rebooting something got fixed by rebooting.  Thought I'd pass this on
Dan Mauch

[John T]

Hi Dan,
If you do two boxes one will be the main and the other flourishes 
So Just create one box on top of the other.

John n

[ArtF]

John:

Fabulous face, and exactly what I had in mind when I jumped into the rabbithole that became
the flourish module. :)

  Usually, when you press "Flourish" the system selects the "Flourishing" layer, so that if you
immediately draw a box, its on that layer. The message "No objects on flourish layer" means the
guides were drawn on another layer. Select "Flourishing" layer before drawing guides.

  Again, there can be many guides on a layer. The master guide must cover all others. All inner guides
will be exclusion guides. The outter layer may be any shape, and may be made of a circle, or lines
drawing a shape, or a box. inner exclusion zones may be any shape. Doesnt always work perfect
( what artist does.) :-)

Art

PS: Im working on spokes to give you much wider latitude..

[ArtF]

Hi All:

  Progress is moving towards the next update, I have added things such as adjustable tab heights in machining,
fixed several bugs, added a database to the vector wizards so drawings can be tracked for positioning as you draw.
I have made it so pretty much any dxf saved by Gearotic can be used as a spoke, and I'm trying to allow any dxf to be
used as a indicator to allow for kinetic vanes so you can see what a spinning design would look like. Im also adding
undo/redo as well I think to prepare for more advanced wizards..

  I have 3/4 of a video done on the old "bat" sculpture, but have also started drawing up a new smaller bat
version that I can actually hang in the house, so we'll see how that goes.  I may decide to just do a video on
a new one showing the proper constant torque spring usage and such.  Still too early to say.  :)

  I expect 2-3 weeks for the next update so you don't have to deal with as many bugs.  Thx for all the comments,
Im glad people are finding the rulers and flourishes to be good additions. Hope the Autumn rains arent sweeping you
away. :)

Art

[Dan Mauch]

I love flourish. I have a 22" clock that I used v3 to make some flourish inside the clock. It took me 6 hours to create the flourish going  through many iterations until I got what I wanted and then editing out what I didn't want and creating an array with my Cad program.. My wife loves it. It is not quite finished as I want to inlay red acrylic in the openings for the Roman Numerals. BTW in the ruler for clock 1 there are two VI  so I changed one to VII. You might want to correct that in future releases.
Flourish is really great  but a couple of thoughts. 1. it would be nice if there was a cut editor to delete any given vine or segment of vine. While I love flourish have you thought about adding a wreath option? Any circular style would be nice.
Dan Mauch

[ArtF]

Dan:

It does seem the idea of flourishes is popular. I wasnt sure and kinda went of faith such a weird item would have any interest. Since it does, the vector editor is being expanded and I will then expand the flourish capabilities, now that the
algorithm works, it shouldnt be too much work to add variations. I just need to make the program architecture more complete..

Art