PixelCNC

For my Affiliate Program with PixelCNC, for every 5 Licenses Sold, they are going to let me give away 1 Copy. 

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We will be giving that away on the Making It Up (As We Go) Live Stream over on the R Ballard Designs Youtube Channel

Check out when Charlie & Leon Joined us & Check out the First Give Away Winner in Episode 15

Today we're reviewing Pixel CNC, this volumetric canvas based CAD cam software. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, we're going to go over that. We're going to teach you how to import a roster and a vector image and then release and then cut that relief out. Also, we're going to go over some final thoughts. And you know, what is who is this for and how much does it cost? All that and more.  

What is a review on the Hammer? Well, they reached out to me, asked if I would review their product, and I said yes. So they gave me a free license so I could get in and mess around, try things out, see how I liked it. And they have zero influence on the final video.

Also, this is going to be a little bit different for my affiliate program. For every five copies purchased through the link. I am going to be able to give away a license for this software, which you can check out on making it up as we go on our Bachelor Designs YouTube channel. Pixel CNC does cost money.

It is $149.99. However, you can try it out and there are three limitations to the free version. One, you cannot save your project. Two, you can't export and steal of your work. Three and no exporting of the hype map of your work either. Pixel CNC, the best definition I've come up with or best way I've come up to describe it is a digital mixed media painting creator for your CNC.

So what does that even mean? Well, everything is based around the canvas, as you can see in here. This is our canvas and we can add roster images. We can add vector images, we can add 3D likes, steal OBJ files and mix them all together together to create our project just like so by creating a simple layer. Let's load in a vector real quick.

Will take this shape file will come in to make sure we're selected on their ed pass. Let's select this right here and then if we go shapes from path, let's give it the Fillet shape and can see they're done. Let's do these real quick. Let's do something a little bit different there. Let's just sit. Done. And now you can see we have these 2.5 3D shapes created that easily and that quickly from an SVG file.

No, having to sit there and figure out how can I get this rounded? What bit do I have to use? It's all created that way. The tool parts are created after the fact. This lets us create and see what we're creating before we even get to the tool parts. Before we jump into Pixel CNC, let's look at the images we're going to be using now.

I drew this United Federation of Planets up in Illustrator, but you can use whatever software you want to draw up your own or use any great skilled image that you have. We're using a grade scaled image to give us our depth. And so if we take a look at this here, you can see we have these side pieces here that are great weighted and they're going from a light gray to a darker gray.

We have these inner rings and even the stars have a ring. And just reminder, black is going to be your lowest level and white is going to be your top. So if you don't want an area to cut, we're going to select white. Also, you can see here we have two layers. We have a roster layer in a vector layer.

We turn off this vector layer, never turn off your vector layer. It has any thickness. So if we selected this piece right here for the cut out, can see that black line is going to show up in a roster layer, but we'll turn when. The other thing is about the vector layer here is you'll notice I have a rectangle around my artboard.

This way it's centers it to the art board. I'm not having to move around this cut out file and get it straight in pixel CNC. This happens in a lot of other softwares as well. So if you're having any issues with a SVG or something importing correctly, draw a square around it for your artboard and export it with that.

Just remember delete it when we get there, but we'll go over that when we're in pixel CNC and see if we just take another quick look. Here we have our background of our United Federation of planet carved in is that's going to be the deepest. Then we have all these fun stars and everything in the middle here and then we even have some text.

Now let's get into pixel CNC, All right, we're in pixel CNC, and like I said, we're going to be importing a roster layer to do all of our 3D work or 2.5, whatever you want to call it. And then we're also going to be importing eight vector AR, SVG to do the cutout. But before we do all that, let's take a look at the canvas properties.

So we'll come over here. We're already in the Project Canvas tab. We're going to click on Canvas Properties right here. You can see over here we have our canvas properties. So the canvas is going to be the area that you want to cut. You can scale it to the size, your work piece, your stock material, or you can just scale it to the size you want to cut.

So let's say you want to just go down three millimeters. You can set the height of your canvas to three millimeters. So that's all we're going to be cutting like I did in these coasters. So let's go ahead and let's size our canvas to our actual stock material that will be using wouldn't it be using a 6.4 millimeters thick MDF board?

But let's get the size in here real quick. It's 606.42 millimeters and four 54.02 millimeters. And like I said, it's 6.4 millimeters thick. Now, this column right here is the size of your canvas origin. That's where your start place or where you're going to zero out your bit. So right now we have origin is zero zero on the X and Y can see here and then we have origin at Z, origin at 6.4.

So that's at the top of the material. If you wanted to make it in the center of your piece, you can easily go 606.42 times 0.5. Hey, hey. And it'll put the origin into the center of your work piece when to make sure I change that back because we are going to be using two bits and I'm going to be we're going to be cutting out the middle of this board.

So I want to have a place where I can go back, switch out bits and zero off of once we have filled all those in, we're going to hit apply. Hey, there we go. Look at that. Next step we're going to do is we're going to create a new layer and this is where we're going to import our first image.

We're going to hit create layer. And as you can see here, we have six different options of importing for this. We're going to be loading an image slash vector as a roster layer. So we'll click on that. You can see here I have my USP underscore dark and we're going to open it is imported our roster image and as placed it at the bottom of our canvas so we're getting you can see already the depth and everything that it's generated from here and that'd be great if we wanted to cut down all 6.4 millimeters, but we don't.

So make sure your canvas layer right here, this image is selected. We're going to come over here and you can see, just like our canvas size, we have this for our actual PNG. So if I, if I wanted a half this can put this here again times point five times point five and we're just going to apply that real quick and see it just scaled it down, but we're going to undo all that.

Now the size here is four. The thickness is how thick do we want this image to go in our stock material? I'm going to change this to three because that's as deep as I want to go. And then origins we're going to keep because it is centered into our canvas, except for the Z. Here again, I only want to go three millimeters deep, so I'm going to put this to negative three.

Let's apply that real quick. And you can see it has brought up our roster image here to three millimeters under the top and it is only three millimeters deep. Now, one of the other cool things is we can smooth some of this out here with this toggle right here. We'll hit apply and you can see it smoothed everything out a little bit.

Now for me, I'm done. I like this. But let's say you want to bring down your whites or blacks a little bit. We can go into the edit roster right here, enable that to start messing with some of the adjustments we can make to this individual roster layer and we can click adjustment levels in here. This right here is your black in, this is your white.

So let's say we want to bring down the white. We pull this down. You can see we're pulling down the white K and then if we wanted to here, we could pull up the black. So your darkest ones raising that up or if you want to completely cut out a certain depth of color, you could do that. And then you can even change how the line curvature here.

So you see, instead of it being straight, we have this. And so if we move this over, it's just going to give you a little bit different control, a little bit different results. But I'm happy with the way mine is. I'm so I'm going to hit cancel here and then I'm going to hit done editing. But as you can see, we got eight other tools we can use.

But again, that's going to be for later video. So we'll hit done editing and we have our roster our roster layer complete and ready to go. But before we move on we're going to add one more layer SVG, our SPG layer layer we're going to use to cut out the outside of this project. So we're going to come back to create layer and instead of load, image and vector, this time we're going to load vector as path layer and we're going to select our as SVG for that.

And you can see it right there, it's been imported and right now both of these files are on the same layer. So if I click this right here, I've now just taken that SVG layer off of group zero, and if I come over to one and then I click here, it puts it on group layer one like I was seeing in Illustrator earlier.

I put the bounding ball, I put that box around my artboard. So when we imported this, I didn't have to move this cutout piece around and get it just right. So just like with the roster layer, we can go in and edit the vector layer and we'll again right here, let's make sure our SVG is selected. First we're going to edit parts and then we're going to select that rectangle right there and delete it.

And that's all we need to do. Now again, if you needed to edit your SVG a little bit more, you can do all of that right there. I'm just going to hit done editing. We're done with that there. And now we're going to the next step where we're going to pick which bits we're going to be using for this project.

So if we click this right here, we'll bring up our project tools. So instead of like other programs where you just you can select them all within there, this one is only going to pull in the tools you want to use for this project. So for a first one here, I'm going to load and I have four bits already entered and we're going to be using the downtown Jenny bit and then we're also going to be using the 60 degree goop.

Groovy Jenny fit and let's see if your first time using this to select or start a new tool. You can hit this type here and then you can select select cylinder tapered V or tapered ball. Now that we have our bid selected that we want to use in this project, let's hop over to the project operations and start making our tool paths.

As you can see here, very similar to our first view screen that we had for the canvas properties, except now we're going to be generating the tool pass. So we're going to have some different tools here that we can use. So for 3D contouring, we have these seven options for patterns to cut out. We have parallel chevrons, spiral labyrinth, conformal Tesla aided and path carving.

Personally, I like the spiral carving. So we're going to click that. You can see here our first operation. Now this first operation, our spiral is going to be for fine detail, work with the V bit. So I'm going to go ahead and change this operation to fine. I'm also going to tell it we want to use a Groovy Jenny 60 and it's seeing nothing showing up.

However, if we change the layer group to our roster layer, which is zero, there we go. We have our roster image in there, then we have our speed for Spindle, our feed and our Engage, which is your Z axis and how fast it engages the material. And for those of you who have fancy cooler machines, you got an option for that direction.

Conventional an entry can do a plunge or ramp here for this type of cut. Now your cut depth, that is how much purpose you wanted to cut down. We're going to say three for this minimum dent. If you don't change this, it's going to cut the white part. But if we .0.1, we're going to get rid of that and I'll show I'll mess around with that a little bit later and show you what happens if we don't change that our max depth.

Our max depth. We're going to want that at three millimeters as well. Our step over, I have it set to 0.1 millimeters. If you don't like setting an actual distance, you rather use a percentage. You can click that right here and that's a 1% step over and then you can set your rapid height and how much stock to leave behind.

And we are going to do a roughing pass for this. But as this is our final pass, I'm going to leave that at zero zero and then we have some more options here. We have link cuts, so this will feed directly into the next cut where possible instead of re tracking the Z and wrap hitting first distance sort, this is going to sort them relative distances from when it does raise just kind of help cut out some of those weird moves.

Sometimes you see when you're generating tool pass and then can find cuts is where we want to make sure the bit never goes outside our canvas area. Don't need that. But we have all our settings for our fine cut and if we hit apply here, we can see it's starting to think we'll let that generate. And there we go.

We can see all of our tool paths for the most part, except from when it's coming here, and then these two are staying within our roster. Image Area member earlier where I said if we don't set the min depth, you might get some unexpected results. It'll or cut the whole thing. So let's go ahead and change that back to zero and then hit apply.

And this is what I was talking about. So now you can see the whole board is selected, so it's going to spiral out and hit all these points and it's going to go over even the places we don't want cut. So just a quick little trick. There is 0.1 and now we're confining it to those areas in those areas.

So we're just not we're telling it, ignore anything that would cut 0.1 millimeters deep. That's what this is doing here. All right. Happy with this. So let's go ahead and add our roughing cut for this right here and we'll go back to new operations. We're still in the 3D contouring. We're going to hit we're going to select spiral carving.

And this is going to be our rough and we're going to be using the downtown Jenny again, we're on layer Group zero. Don't need to change any of these cut depth three max. Step three, step over. Now, this is a 6.4. So I'm going to do let's just say it's just a roughing pass. We're going to do three assists, do three millimeters and rapid height one and leave stock.

Let's go point five and then we're going to hit apply. And so here we can see with our downtown Jenny bit that we're going to spiral out and create all that. Now this is going to be we'll move that rough above the fine right there and see we can switch back and forth between these two different operations and their paths.

We did the rough and the fine pass. Now let's talk about the SVG. We imported into our cutout. So if we come over to new operations now, we're going to come over to the 2./2.5, the milling, and then we have five options here and we're going to select the 2D profile milling and see it turned red. It doesn't like that we can even see here.

We've got to X. Why is that? Well, that is because we are not on the correct layer. So let's go over here and switch it to our vector layer. And you can see here it's like and it better, it's green, but we're still not there. So we're going to come down to contour where it says Trace canvas, select that path layers.

And then we're going to select Ufp outline dark. And there we go. Now we have as Fiji selected. All right, so we have our cut depth. I'm going to change that to three millimeters and our max, I'm going to tell it cut all the way through because that's what we want to do on this outside cut step over, not relevant in this and then offset for this.

So if I leave this at zero, it is going to cut along the center of the bit to the center of the line. If I said 6.33 in this case, and then let's just hit apply, you can see it went inside my vector by 6.33 millimeters. But if I change this to -6.33 hit apply, it's now move my pass outside of our as Fiji and there are some more things we can do like we can change this to ramp right here.

A distance sword or any of that thing is not going to really be applicable and just a simple cut like this. So we're just going to hit apply so it ramps in and that's really it. Now that we have all our tool paths for this generated, we are going to come over and look at the simulation here. Oh, real quick, before I do that operation, let's call this cut out, apply, make sure we label it.

All right, now let's go in the project simulation and this is what we have for the rough. Now, let's take a quick look at the fine. All our different tool movements. We can scrub through here. And if you want to turn off the tool paths and just see what is actually cutting out, we can turn them off with the eye right there.

All right. Now, this one is saying 23 hours. So I'm probably going to break this up. Not probably I am going to break this up into separate, smaller Gecko files once those are done. But for right now, we're not going to worry about that. Let's take a look at our final cut out. You can see I'm too far outside there, here, and I'm getting this lip.

So let's go back to our cut out. And instead of -6.33, let's times that by point half inner and then apply. Now let's come look at our cut out. Let's turn this off, cut out, and voila, There we go. Much better. As you can tell, this is not centered. We're cutting pretty close here to here. That's an issue in my illustrator file.

Don't worry. I'm going to go back in there, straighten everything out, get that centered. But let's keep going and let's look at the generating G code. We are going to come up here to file and we're going to export G code. And here is where you select your post processor. And they have several different post processors here and make sure you are selecting the right one.

We're in metric, so I'm using verbal metric. We're going to hit. Okay, next open G code after export, you can toggle that one. Now we can also export three different ways. We can individually put per tool or we can combine them all. So depending on your project and your machine, you can select which one you want to do.

For this one, we're doing individual. After that, we have the option for 2D Operation Repetition. Now this is a really cool, cool idea. Let's say we had a 12 by 12 piece of wood. We were going to be cutting out a three inch by three inch design. So that means we could come in here and say, Hey, four times along the x axis, four times along the Y axis, and it would grid them out like that.

That's really cool. So you could just do one design and then grid it out over your whole stock material that you're using. This one is already pretty big. We're not doing that, and I don't have that big a machine. Also, you can affect the spacing in between those, but we've got all our settings correct and we're ready to go.

So we're going to export as and then we're going to export these into our G code folder here. I'm just going to call them Ufp and then I'm going to hit save here's our rough, here's our downtown Jenny cut out and here's our fine cut out and within a all these is going to give you the version that was generated with here's your post processor which bit is right here and the spindle speed.

All right it's time to go and throw this on the long mill again. I'm going to go recenter it re put all this in real quick and get cutting. So yeah. Had some issues during the cut. Nothing to do with pixel CNC or my CNC machine. No, I didn't get a flat surface for my board so it started bending up in the middle.

So my cuts were going deeper. At first I thought I was losing heights in the Z axis. So instead of chunking the board because it's a last six millimeter MDF board I had, I went back into Pixel CNC and set everything 1.5 millimeters lower. So if we come over here, you can see size is still three millimeters thick.

So we only want it to go three millimeters high. And then I changed the or the Z origin to -4.5. So we lowered everything down and I reran it and like I said, I totally thought I was losing a height in my z-axis I was I was adjusting the anti backlash, not thinking that was it again, no, my board was not was coming up in the middle.

Now I've used the double sided tape measure, a tape measure, double sided tape a lot and had good results. I'm not sure why this one popped up, but nothing a few screws can fix. But again, even during the second cut, that's when I noticed it was a board. It wasn't C high with anti backlash. Note, was it? You know, any binding or anything like that?

It was my board. Even though there were some mistakes in this cut and some parts are a little bit lower. So I'm just going to go ahead and we're going to use this board and we're going to fix it up. And that's going to be in another video where we actually go ahead and finish this sign up and get it all looking nice and neat painted or maybe making a resin mold.

Not sure. We'll see. And here we go. Not the final product. Well, final product of cutting. Yes, there were lots of issues, but none of them happened to be with CNC pixel. All of that was user error. That's right. I we see it a lot. We all we've all seen it where. Oh, this machine's broken. Oh this software didn't cut it right All on me.

All on me because we've done several tests before that we got the Cisco, we got the defiant DS9, we got Ravenclaw. Yeah, there we go. We also got Lola, That's our family dog. And we also have this fun sun and leaf design. I made an illustrator and not to forget lower decks. Yes, this one was also another mammoth one had no problems cutting it out.

Pretty much the same process as what we're seeing here in the United Federation of Planets cut out. So really, I have no complaints with Pixel CNC, I have run into a few issues while using it. I've had a couple shut downs and everything. If you do, you have any issues you can go to file and then go to view log files and that's going to bring up all of these.

And then so you can send these log files into pixel CNC so they can see what happened when and how in any way that they can fix it. It's actually helped a couple of times working on this review besides, you know, occasional shut downs and this and that. I would say learning curve was quite difficult for me at least.

I'm very used to other CAD software. You know it's import the SVG now tell the tool to cut out here and do this You know this you're designing and you're getting what is you wanted to look like before you ever touch a tooling path. So that really was a little bit change in thinking there are so many different options and where you can place things and just knowing where all those are.

So yes, there there is some learning curve to this, especially if you're kind of set in your ways with other software where everything's kind of very similar or if you're brand new. When I first downloaded this, I really didn't know where to start. So jump in, watched a few tutorials and then let myself kind of explore from there.

I really do like this roster based approach to it. It is different, you know, normally you get the roster layer, it's for half tones and everything. Making that a height map really is a cool idea. I think that's really awesome. And you know, taking some of those SVG designs, you know, into Illustrator or Inkscape and then gradient great aiding them in there to really kind of home out.

That is really cool. Not just with gradation if you take it into pixel CNC and do the shapes from paths and those four different options and really control how high and low they are, there's it's really up to you and what you feel comfortable with. I think it will be easier if you come in this with the roster layer roster image that you're comfortable with and kind of just play around with and then slowly kind of work your way into deeper into the software to get to a lot of the cool features.

I mean we didn't even go over the brushes. We, we just barely mentioned them at the beginning. But there's brushes. You can do a note editing work. So there's a lot of different things you can do to create your image. And I really think artist are going to like this. Some even non artist people, you know, they've got an image they can just import the black and white or grade scaled version of it and beyond.

They don't even have to worry about brushes or anything. But the tool parsing part is actually very simple. I think most complicated part of this software is the designing part. That first step and going in knowing where it is on the canvas. I would recommend this to anybody wanting to do relief carvings, even trying out the half moon.

I have not tried that out yet. I am excited to look into that. I'm going to give it a you should try it out. Remember, you can try it out for free. Can't save your work if you like it. It's $150 or 149 99. To be technically correct. And remember, if you use the affiliate link down below for every five license sold, I'm going to be able to give out a free version, which I will be giving out on the making it up as we go along on the hour value design YouTube channel.

Really been fun being on that show. Thank you, everyone who is a part of that. I think that's going to wrap it up for this video. Thank you all so much for watching. If you liked it, remember to give that thumbs up if you didn't like it. Okay, fine. Go ahead. You can give it that thumbs down. It's all good.

And also, if you want, hit that subscribe button to keep up with all the latest videos from DE Hammer. And until next time, remember, keep making stuff.