Greyscale Carving Improvements

Easel Feature Requests
1

They greyscale carving feature of Easel is awesome and I use it a lot, particularly for topo maps. It’s so much faster to get a project ready than using VCarve, but can I suggest a few major improvements for this feature and other related options…

  1. Depth per Pass: When carving greyscale vectors, Easel seems to ignore the depth per pass and instead carve each grey layer separately (assuming it’s less than the specified tool dpp). This means it can take AGES to carve a piece with several shallow cuts. It would be good to maximise the depth per pass rather than carve by layer.

  2. DPP for Roughing Tools: When using the roughing tool / detail carving feature it would also be very useful to set a separate DPP and feed rate. Using a bigger tool means higher feed rates and bigger DPP are possible but you can’t set these in Easel.

  3. Detail carving only for selected items: This one’s a bit more advanced but it would be great to be able to choose which items to use the detail bit for, rather than all of them. A simple checkbox would be all that’s required with “Use Detail Bit”.

  4. Not really a feature request but I’m managing to crash Easel with some hefty greyscale SVGs. Are there any workarounds for this - i.e. best browsers to use / possible standalone version? I think when it comes to complicated SVGs the power of Easel is held back a bit by the web browser. At the moment I’m just simplifying them until it doesn’t crash! (<300kB seems to be a good guide)

  5. Still hoping for a nice export preview image feature so I don’t have to manually check a carved layer in VCarve every time! Checking the toolpaths is impossible for complicated carvings.

Thanks!

2

Al, I’ve been battling this exact same problem - too detailed topo SVG’s. I even upgraded my carving machine to a fancy 16GB Core I7 yada yada yada but even the new rig couldn’t handle the detail. I also had to simplify nodes and fine detail to get the thing to work in one pass.

A standalone app that doesn’t save after every mouse movement (like google docs) and a time to completion estimator would help immensely with my workflow, also, in my opinion.

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3

I understand the goal of Easel is to be user friendly. There has been a lot of discussion about advanced features. I think a solution would be “Easel Plus” stand alone, offline app. Even charge a modest fee for it. A non browser based app would perform better.

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