WELCOME!


It is hard to believe that it was only seven years ago I witnessed a CNC router in action for the very first time. I was fascinated and simply had to have one! Although I had been in the creative end of the three dimensional sign business for most of my life I didn't really know what I would do with one - but I just knew it could do fantastic stuff.

Through extensive research I quickly found out that with the relative simplicity of EnRoute, CNC routers were capable of just about anything imaginable. This journal will chronicle that journey to date and continue each week with two or three entries as we continue to explore just what is possible with this wonderful software... -dan

Friday, March 19, 2010

'T' is for texture!


It wasn't long until adding one texture to a routing file was old news. I wondered if it was possible to add multiple textures... and yes it was! With EnRoute textures are relatively simple. Simply define a shape with a vector line, build a profile, then overlay a bitmap image over the shape, select both and insert a numeric value, and with one click texture is created. Black does nothing, white raises by the amount specified and various shades of grey are in between. Repeating the steps and combining the building pieces make anything I can imagine suddenly possible.

It was back to the drawing board and experimentation stage as I struggled to figure out what worked and what didn't. We filled the dumpster once again with failed experiments, but also built a sizable display board with what did work. This was fun... much more fun than working!

Each successful sample provided a test bed for our painting techniques too. We were using all water based acrylics and applying everything by hand with brushes. In doing so we found we could recreate anything we saw around us... and much, much more. We could create anything we could imagine!
This was WAY more fun than working!

-dan