VCarve help going from 2D shapes to 3D view

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I haven’t pulled the trigger on vcarve yet, but was going to soon. I’ve been watching a lot of the videos and folling around with things.
Am I missing something basic, or is pretty much the only way to turn your 2D shapes into a 3D view is to create the toolpaths? I guess I was expecting to be able to draw a cube with a given height, as opposed to just a rectangle.

I’m having some trouble creating the toolpaths I think I want, but even if I weren’t, it seems like creating each toolpath one at a time would get tedious fairly quickly if you had a dozen or so shapes.

Here’s a .crv file I made just to illustrate my point, say you were going to carve this, and backlight the star as a window decoration or something. The circle should be cut all the way through, the square field around the circle should be maybe 0.25 inches deep, and the start and its base should be maybe 0.5 inches deep. OK, so this isn’t going to win any design awards, but it can illustrate my point, and if there were double or triple the cutting areas, it would just be that much more difficult.

So, if I understand what I’ve been seeing in the videos, I’d have to select each combination of shapes that form the boundary of a toolpath, create the toolpath for that area, then the next and so on.

Is there a simpler way?
Thanks,
Kelly

screenshot of the crv file:

.crv file:

simple.crv (14.5 KB)

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Vcarve is a great tool, but you are correct, you layout your basic 2D geometry like your picture above then you define toolpaths to remove material.

Drawing a square and then extruding it upward to form a cube is what solid modeling software like Fusion 360 does. You actually draw the 3D forms and then allow the software to create toolpaths that extract those shapes from the material.

Vcarve is not a solid modeling tool, mainly because it is much simpler to draw 2D shapes. This does prevent you from designing complex 3D objects. For example it would not be possible to create a sphere using the drawing and toolpath commands in Vcarve.

Vcarve really shines when you want to design a sign, or use a vBit to carve a vector drawing.

You can also import 3D STL files that have been created in other 3D modeling programs like Aspire or Sketchup and then create a tool path that will carve the complex 3D shape

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OK, Thanks @AllenMassey, I suppose I should be happy that I didn’t just miss a huge piece of functionality!

I may try to dust off my SketchUp abilities to see how far I can get with the combination.
Thanks,
Kelly