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

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Swingin'

This past week I was gone from my studio for four days while on a quick business trip to Florida. I'm almost over the jet lag now and back at my desk once more. We are currently working our way through the signs for the theme park. Today's task was the Wave Swinger sign. As always we start with the concept art to sell the sign to the client. The beaver will be a hand sculpt while the rest will be done in EnRoute and on the MultiCam.


The vectors were pretty easy and done in Illustrator and then imported into EnRoute.  I did a bit of kerning and had to shorten the bottom of the 'V' to make it fit but nothing major was required. I also added a lettering outline using the offset tool.


I selected the inner and outer ring and made a donut shaped relief using the dome tool.

 I then modified the base relief by selecting the relief and the lettering outline vectors.


Lastly I added the letters by modifying the base relief once more using the letter vectors and the dome tool. This finished the reliefs I needed.


But I needed a five foot ring and my Precision Board comes in four foot widths. This meant I had to cut the relief to make it fit. I would do this by creating two (cut) pie shaped  zero height reliefs, merging them together and then cutting off the extra zero height portions using the slice tool.





I could then rotate them and nest them to fit both pieces onto a 4' x 8' piece of 2" thick Precision Board.

I'll be gluing these up in the next while and I'll show that process and how everything fit together to make an easy assembly and mounting procedure. Stay tuned...

-dan