Peter Sawatzky, my partner (and son) also works with EnRoute and our MultiCam CNC router and plasma cutter. He does some pretty amazing projects. From time to time he'll be posting them here. It is our hope that with one more voice describing his techniques and methods, hopefully there will be one more source of learning and inspiration. His first post if a little family crest he did for his lovely wife, Hailey's recent birthday.
- Import your design into Enroute.
I start the project with a loose sketch of a coat of arms featuring a zebra head and three bumblebees.
- Draw your shapes in Enroute.
Using my sketch as a guide, I carefully draw each of the shapes I will use to create my reliefs.
- Create your reliefs.
Each of the reliefs is created separately - they will be merged together just before toolpathing.
The majority of the reliefs are made with the flat and round "create relief" tools. However the bee's wings are made with the "smooth relief edit" tool.
Using the "smooth relief edit" tool, I slowly build up the ends of the wings so that they emerge from the bee's body.
- Apply bitmaps to your reliefs.
The ribbon appears to wind over and under itself - this is done by applying a custom bitmap to the ribbon relief.
I use a black and white image - when I apply the bitmap to the relief the black areas do not change my relief but the white areas raise my relief 0.25". Basically, the lighter the shade of grey the higher it raises my relief.
The stripes on the zebra are applied using the same technique. However, I set the white areas to raise the zebra relief a tenth of an inch.
- Merge your reliefs and add your toolpaths
Once each of the pieces has been finished I align and merge them to create a single relief ready for toolpathing.
Once routed, the coat of arms is ready for paint.
