 Hey, what's up folks welcome back to another layer-by-layer in today's tutorial We're gonna take a look at some C and C engraving patterns. So here's what I have to show today I've been working on creating a workflow for creating these patterns that are engraved with a desktop CNC mill I'm using the Bantam tools desktop CNC and I created these really really fun It's hard to focus here, but these are this was created with the fusion 360's manufacturing workspace and these are patterned Operations and graving operations if you're trying to create a seamless repeatable pattern on a piece of acrylic You might want to check this out. I think I got a pretty good workflow So I got this piece set up here as just as a demo. Come on camera. Let's focus here And I applied it to these these pieces of acrylic that I made for my DIY midi fighter So here I have this really fun hexagonal Pattern that's that's been engraved here again This is CNC engraving not laser cutting or laser engraving a very very different I think and then on the top here I have this fluorescent pink Acrylic and then I have these these fun circles that overlap and create these diamond patterns So if you're trying to do something like this Stay tuned. So, yeah, let's jump into kind of the background on on how I tried to achieve this originally, right? So let's switch over so this is website from Sunchaser Studio and it lets you create these geometric patterns with these sliders and You can also download patterns from free websites that are vector SVG files And my idea was to just bring in the pattern into fusion 360 and then try to engrave them Right? It seems simple enough, but what I ran into is a lot of selecting so in fusion I would have to select each individual circle and Instead of doing that and spending a lot of time selecting things I figured there's must be a way to pattern eyes Engravings and that's what I found how to do so let's jump into fusion 60 and we'll recreate this pattern With the sketches and then actually run through the operations for CNC milling So let's jump into fusion 360 now the first thing I'm going to do is model my piece of acrylic So if you've never done seen seeing before this is probably a good a good take on it So let's create a new component. I'm just gonna call this acrylic hit okay The next thing I'll do is I'll bring up my user parameter window I have it set to a hotkey as you but you can hit the The s key and then type in parameters and there's change parameters and that'll open the same thing Just a little tip there. So the first parameter I'm gonna hit the plus button and I want to call this my acrylic thickness All right, and I really recommend making a user parameter for the thickness of material because acrylic tends to be different These three pieces of acrylic that I showed you. Well, they all have different They all have different thicknesses. So I'm just gonna stick with three for now. I'm gonna stick with three and Then I'll hit okay, and then that way we can change it easily whenever we need to All right, the next thing I'll do is now that I'm inside my acrylic component I'll create a new sketch and I tend to model as if I am modeling on the spoil board of my CNC machine, so that's gonna be on the floor plane here Okay, the next thing I do is I have the Bantam tools software open This is the software I use for my CNC and you probably want to pick The origin wherever your origin is for the Bantam tools desktop CNC. It's here on the lower left corner That is zero zero. So I'm gonna do the same thing. I'll start my rectangle sketch here and for the dimensions I have a pretty small CNC. So I'm gonna put 100 by 100 and that's easy to work with so now that's it set up I'll hit E on my keyboard and that'll select that profile and I will make it go three millimeters Well, I'm gonna type in acrylic because we already set the user parameter and that way it's three millimeters And if I ever change that user parameter, this will automatically this extrude will automatically get updated So cool. I got that updated. I had that set. The next thing is to create a New sketch. So I'll drop down this and look at my sketch here. This is gonna be my profile acrylic And I need to make a new I need to make a new a new sketch, right? So where should the sketch be? So whenever you're engraving stuff On a piece of material like I have modeled here. You definitely want to pick like the top surface So I'm gonna select that top surface and then just start sketching right on top of there All right, so so what we're gonna do what pattern we're gonna make It's gonna be different per thing But I'm gonna go with this circular pattern because I think it's kind of easy to do So I'll grab my circle sketch and I'll just start sketching my circle. How big what's the diameter? I'm gonna go with 10 millimeters just because it's a nice kind of rounded number and make another circle with the with the circle tool and By the way, it's the letter C on your keyboard for circle C for circle again 10 millimeters here Now what I need to do is I need to position this thing So that it is constrained to this origin. So what I'll do is I'll say I want a sketch dimension That's the letter D on my keyboard I'll select that center there and then the center of our origin and then kind of work my way down here You can see here that it says 10 So I'll apply that by clicking and then well it's set to 10 That's what I want. So hit enter and I'll do the same thing but for the opposite end going this way Right on my x-axis and you can see that's also 10. So 10 hit enter good now. The next thing I'm gonna do is I want to offset this From the circle so from this center to this center I want that to be five and I'll do that For the y-axis here going up here make that five So now I have these the circle that's overlapping the circle right in the center there And that's really the way that this is really put together if you break down this pattern to its core elements It's core profiles. This is all you really need. You need two circles, and that's it. So that's pretty cool so One of the ways I like to visualize my pattern because this is really hard to kind of how does that make a pattern well You can use the rectangular pattern in the sketch shortcuts window here I brought that up with the s key and now I can type in rect for rectangular pattern and select that I need to select these two circles And then I get these arrows and I can click and drag these arrows to create To create to create that that that pattern right so as I move it it's spreading them more further apart I want the the distance between those entities to be Ten right now if you look at distance type, it's set to extend we want to change that to spacing So we want even amount of spacing how much spacing ten millimeters because that's that's the diameter that we set our circles to be Cool So I got that it's it says negative ten because it's going in An in that in this way if you were to go positive because the opposite way it's just the way sometimes things are and So the next thing I want to do is make some more going up this way So how how much do I want to offset these same thing ten millimeters now you're Don't hit okay because you really don't need these sketches It's a great way to visualize them But you're not actually going to select every one of these circles We're just using this as a way to visualize is the distance between my entities make the pattern that I'm envisioning in This case. Yeah, so I'm gonna hit cancel and now I know ten millimeter is the spacing that I want for my circles, right? You see why I picked these circles nuts It's it's fairly easy to kind of come up with the with the pattern with them So that's really it I'm gonna hit okay sketch I mean I'm gonna hit okay, then I'm gonna name the circles and I'm gonna keep these open and that's really all we need to do in the design workspace next we need to Jump on over so if you click on design There's a manufacturing workspace. I'm gonna switch to it and the first thing we do set is create a setup, right? So I'm gonna click on this right here. It's a setup And now I need to select my stock point, right? And we were talking about the origin like of our Bantam tool CNC you can see where it is Here in the lower left corner, so I'm gonna go ahead and select the lower left corner What the x-axis is is is where I think it is it's going across like that and the y-axis is going that way going up and down So far so good, right? And then z-axis is going up and down that looks good the next tab right here So everything here is fine. I've selected my thing I don't have to worry about anything else here under the stock though You do want to change some things now if you're working with wood or or We're working with wood or metal Then you it's okay to have a top a stock top offset But when you're working with acrylic release, I have found you never really want to have an offset to your top acrylic The the whole the whole width of your acrylic You just don't have an offset you wouldn't face it either because it's acrylic and if you face the transparent piece of material of acrylic It's no longer going to be transparent So I'm gonna set this to zero. There's a long way to say set that to zero But there you go if you want an offset on your sides You could do that But I don't really foresee needing one because I'm just doing a pattern on a piece of stock here So I'm gonna put zero so that if you go down here to dimensions now you see this a hundred by hundred by three millimeters It's exactly our model is exactly the same dimensions as our stock material That's what we want a lot of times you you know when you're like I said when you're working with wood You're gonna have a different set of stock But we're because we're engraving on a particular piece of acrylic here. This is what we want hundred by hundred by three millimeters So let's hit okay Now that our setup is correct as a setup We want to create an engrave and engrave is found under the 2d Tool set here under the milling tab Engrave or what I like to do is hit S key and then just type in engrave and that tends to work pretty good So I have that I'll select my engraving and now the first thing you want to do is select your tool okay, so shout out to the Bantam tools company because they have a They gave away a base applied that you could download a tool library Import that into fusion and then use their their tools already set up So depending on your machine you might have to create your own tools or Import a library from the manufacturer. This isn't going to cover that because that's that's another 30 minutes So I'm just gonna go ahead and select the engraving bit. That's already pre select pre-defined for me Again, I grabbed this from the the Bantam tools library that you can download for free So so select now when it comes to feeds and speeds. This is default stuff. I do tend to reference The Bantam tools documentation they have some pretty good settings here for their feeds and speeds when doing acrylic So if you'd like that you can check out this article here from them, but we're not gonna focus on that We're gonna focus on actually selecting things So let's pretend like we have all our settings and speeds and speeds optimized, right? We have the right tool selected at least so now we're gonna go to the geometry tab And this is where you want to select the things that you want to engrave now as I roll over here It's giving you a nice little tooltip. It's telling you air. You don't have anything selected. Yeah, I know I haven't selected anything yet so the thing that I really want to stress here is that like if you're trying to Engrave something and you're not sure why you can't select it. This is probably why anything that can be engraved must be a Closed boundary right this toolpath requires a closed boundary So you can see here like the letter T. That's a closed shape So if you have a bunch of lines and they aren't creating a shape that's closed That's not gonna work. So in my case when I was trying to make like just a standard Pattern of lines, I wasn't able to do that in this method because the parallel Operation is what you want to use. We're not going to cover the parallel operation because that's very limited to just lines I'm gonna do these circles. So with that out of the way Now you get an idea that hey, there's a caveat here with the engraved tool Whatever you're trying to engrave must be an enclosed boundary. So a closed shape like this circle So I'm gonna select the circle the first circle and then I'll select the second circle And then from there You want to hit your heights tab and your heights? Well, when you want to focus on is all the way at the bottom where it says bottom height You want it? This is this offset here This is where how it's basically think of it as like well, how deep would you like your engraving to be? Would you like you to be? Go down a millimeter Well, in this case, I'm gonna put point four millimeters zero point four Because I just tend to like that number you might like point one point two doesn't really matter as long as you know That this is where you want to set that the bottom height and then another thing to look at here is where it says the top height That is where It is from right it's saying from bottom. It's a little hard to explain But basically it's like the bottom height is the top surface of your stock How you want to go down negative point two from the top of your stock and that's how deep your engraving is It's a little hard. You can roll over these and read through it as you'd like um But remember this is engraving so the bottom is really the top surface of our of our stock So hopefully that makes sense and that's why I have a negative value because we're actually going Further down because if this was zero then you wouldn't be milling anything You just be milling on top of the surface and it wouldn't actually go down any so that's why I have this set to negative point four All right. I think that's it for the passes. There's nothing to do there same thing with the linking I'll hit okay, and now we can actually start simulating this And by default here you get a simulation Though the simulation model tends to overlap your existing model. So it kind of Inter it creates these weird visual effects So you can see the gray here is what we modeled and the green Is what simulated so i'm going to turn off the model by using the little eye icon here And you can see I can turn it off and on and as i'm turning it off and on you can see the full Kind of simulated Visual here it looks kind of terrible But that's just the way it tends to look And another thing to note here is that like look at if you if you're really um If you look carefully those are two kind of pac men. They're not actually the circle pattern isn't actually Intersecting each other. So why is that right? This is my first clue as to like there's something wrong here And there's something that can be done So i'm going to click simulate and then that lets you simulate what your your uh Your tool path is going to do so i'm going to hit the play button And you'll see here that it It's not actually doing a circle It's doing a circle with like a moon piece and then doing it again So again, we'll play it again It does like a circle and then like half of a circle. It's it's really weird. Okay, so I'm not sure why it's doing this, but it's just the best that fusion can do Um with this So if we want that effect where the circle is actually, you know intersecting the second circle Instead of selecting those two circles in that one engrave operation Let's make two engrave operations. So first what I'll do is I'll right click on our first engrave I'll go under the geometry tab and just hit x and clear them out Now everything's gone because I need to turn that i thing on again so I can see everything And now i'm just going to select one of these two circles just one You can see here chain is selected and hit okay And now when I simulate that I think I might have crashed fusion Yeah, I crashed fusion You definitely want to save Before I don't even know what to tell them here. Just like I tried I guess send report and You know, we'll have to do it again Yeah, I don't I don't know what happened there. It was pretty simple. I wasn't doing anything too calm I'm literally selecting a circle What do you think guys should I keep it in the tutorial or remove it if you're watching Uh, let me know in the comments if I should have left this in or should have tooking it out Because I don't know nothing was saved so I have to start over again Oh wait, we got to un-recover we got to recover file hit open Oh, this is great. You know what? I bet fusion crashed Because it was trying to autosave this I've had it happen before I'm quite used to it All right, so let's go back into uh into this All right click on the engrave Under geometry deselect that and select just one circle. Okay now hit okay and hopefully it doesn't crash All right, it looks good now. So now when we simulate this you can see That's what I want. I just want one circle and then I want another circle, right? So that's what we're going to do. We can we can duplicate this with the you know command d or control d or right click and then there's uh Somewhere in this big list here. It is duplicate There it is took a second right click edit go to the geometry and deselect it and then select that second circle and then hit okay All right, so to simulate them both. Well, it kind of already did it for me. I can see at the end there Look at that. That is actually what we want Again, I have to kind of hide the models to show you the full model the full simulated model And that is exactly what we want. You can clearly see that there are intersecting circles And it's it's kind of important like if I would have gone through the other way It wouldn't have achieved that same effect. So now when I do simulate I want to make sure that the setup is uh selected and then simulate And then when I play through them, you'll see that one circle Retracts up and then it does another circle and then it retracts up again So if you hide You can kind of make out so the color the the paths are color coded The actual path is blue and the retraction path is yellow and then um, I think this is like the The movement when it's retracting the red one But uh, it's just important to note that they're they're color coded for a reason to separate them So that is what we want. So now that we have uh these two circles We need to patternize them. So we have our two things And now I want to create a pattern of copies of these and and then really kind of fill it out with this thing Kind of how we were patternizing our sketch now. We got to patternize our engraving. So let me hit close here That turns off the simulation. You could also hit escape. I like hitting escape So with the shift key you want to select both of these So I'm going to hold down shift and select both pretty universal to hold down shift But right click on those two selected items and then say right here. It says add to new pattern So that's going to stuff it in a folder. Now. I have a new window here to play with I can't see anything yet. So I'm going to turn on my models again So I can actually see stuff and the first thing it wants me to select is nothing right here Where it's a direction it says nothing That's kind of funny. Uh, so right here. It's this pattern type just to throw it out there It's defaulted to the linear pattern. That's a rectangular pattern But you could also do circular a mirror a direction and a component I'm going to stick with linear and then for the direction Uh, I want my origin to show up here. So I'm going to under the model window. There's your unsaved document Under the unsaved document. There's our origin hiding. So let's bring it out I'm going to select the red line, which is our x axis And then you'll see here it says x in the direction And then there's some options here flip direction You can click that if you want to go the opposite direction, but for now it looks pretty good Uh, the spacing right for our direction is 10 millimeters. Hey, that's what we want And then our number of instances you can click to increase it or add a number I don't know how many maybe 10 You can see here that it's going beyond the stock and you could do that But then you're milling air. So I'll stick with nine and that way I'm going just to the edge of my acrylic my stock And that's just one direction You can do an additional direction because it says so right here So let's check that and then uh same stuff you can flip the direction if you like You have your um your spacing here and then your number of instances So just like we did with the x axis. Oh, I have to select an axis So that'll be my y the green line the y axis, right? And uh instances also nine so just by looking at it you can see like hey, that's finally The pattern that we wanted to create wanted to create those overlapping circles that create kind of these diamond shapes So once I hit okay, um I think fusion would have rendered it out, but it didn't so I'll do I'll select that pattern and then go to simulate And um I can simulate it Now it's hard to see with our model. So again, I have to hide the model. There we go And if you don't want it, you can just hit this go to the end of the tool path and you'll see this fully Modeled fully rendered simulation here and that's kind of what we want Very cool That looks great Yeah, so we have these nice overlapping circles that create our pattern Now one of the things that I found while doing this is if you take a note If time is is is value to you You might want to optimize the machining time. So how can you do that? Well, if you look at the yellow line notice that I my my tool head has to go up a lot and as you increase more instances You're going to increase more machining time and all it's doing is just going up So you can control how far it goes up. So instead of going a whole 10 millimeters up, let's change it. So I'll hit close or hit the escape key, which I should have did Under our patterns we can still modify our engraving, right? So let me modify this engraving Under heights, you see where it says retract height? I'm going to change that 10 to a 1 And do you see where it says retract height? I'm going to change that 5 to a 1 And then I'll hit okay. I'm going to do that same edit to engrave to so engraving edit Go to heights Change that 10 from retract for the clearance height change that to 1 retract height change that to 1 We're going to leave the feed height alone Okay, and everything else alone. So I'll hit okay And now when we simulate that We'll see how different Our yellow thing looks so let me instead of just just go to the end and you can see here. Yeah, that's That's definitely going to save us some time. Um, how much time I should have noted, but I definitely sometime maybe significant yeah, so Yeah, you can do machining time, but I never find it to be accurate So I won't even bother with that. But hey, that's a little tip But you don't want to go any lower than 1 millimeter. Now. Why why do you say that? Well Let's jump over to the camera here and take a look at what happens when you have 0.1 well It looks like I went I didn't go high enough, right? So what happened here is I went pretty deep But because I had such a low retraction value I actually draw I actually scarred the surface of my acrylic And basically messed up this whole piece. So you can see here that all of these were scars You know because I didn't tell it to retract high enough. So be careful not to go any lower than 1 millimeter That's my little tip there trying to save time and you end up Causing Yeah, you know the opposite of saving time, right? But that's just what happened here These are little patterns a little little diamond cubes that I created here And uh, it would have looked cool, but there you go my mistakes. Hopefully you don't make that mistake here Okay, so jumping back into fusion you can see here That's that's how we can create this cool geometric pattern And that's just circles, right? So if you want to create hexagon, it's a little different But I have another document here. Well, we'll kind of step through it Um, or at least I had a document. Let me open it again because fusion crashed remember so let's uh Pull out that It's actually part of my three by three acrylic button box and it says you have a backup. No, I don't need to See that I didn't actually change anything All right, so under the manufacturing workspace, I have a couple of Fun patterns that I set up here That are pretty uh specific here. So this was a nice one. I call this the cube hex They're uh hexagons that have rumbuses inside them. So here's what it looks like It's basically what I showed you with the scarred um piece of acrylic, but like finer pitched and um And more of them, right? So the way I was able to create this one is that if you look really carefully Let me just play it actually what I actually ended up doing was creating these these rumbuses shape independently and then selecting those um Those rumbus shapes uh in in the uh in the Engraving so if you look at the engraving, it's just two of them just like how we had before um And then they're just patternized So instead of selecting so let me right click on one of them edit and show you what's like What's being selected here? I have to show and hide my model Several times to show how that looks here So it's um case bottom sketch And then this is the sketch that we want to show the hex cubes Yeah So basically I drew a hexagon and then within the hexagon I drew the rumbuses so that they could be selected independently So it's a little tricky to select them, but you can select them out and I selected them So you can see here three selections one two three shapes And then I did that uh for this second one here um Three shapes right and those three rumbuses create that hexagon So once those were created then I was able to uh just select those and then um Create a pattern with them And then that's how you can create this so it really came down to like How do I optimize my engraving profiles? So uh so that I can uh Create the expected tool path right it's what it comes down to is to like simulating it And then really breaking down your pattern into its bare Profiles like what how can I make this thing? So uh if folks want to see how I sketch that let me know, but it's a little bit of a Of another 30 minutes because the circles were were you know We're a little bit more easier than like constraining Five different shapes, but that's just a quick look at how I was able to create these really fun geometric patterns In fusion 360 so if you are looking to do similar stuff I hope this is a helpful tool. I know I'll be referencing this tutorial In the future Because I tend to relearn how to do engraving each time I jump back into cnc And I can't get my my focus to work ever Maybe that it looks so much better in person too. It's kind of funny But that's it. Let me know what you guys think. I hope you guys learned something new But until next time remember to uh make a great day Bye folks