Inverted carving layernig

[Baron Richard]

I am trying to carve 2 crossed swords (purchased Patterns) inverted to make a mold. Unfortunately no matter what depth or height setting I use, the crossing is not coming out right. The shallower (vertical) sword is at a depth of .10", the deeper (horizontal) at .15" I've tried height setting from 1 to 999 for each sword and have tried using the Addition/Subtraction settings with no success either.

If I set them patterns to positive and remove the surrounding material, the swords do not add to each other and appear correctly.

Baron Ricahrd

[Baron Richard]

I am not using any Merger Control, as I said, using the Addition and Subtraction do not resolve the issue.

Try it your self, inverted designs seem to be handled differently in the software.

I may not post often, but I have been using the CW for 4 years...

[fwharris]

Try setting the height to "0".....

[TerryT]

Try it your self, inverted designs seem to be handled differently in the software.

I may not post often, but I have been using the CW for 4 years...

Ok... here is a concrete mold I made about a year ago. This is two seperate patterns put together to make a stepping stone.

[TerryT]

Some more pictures. I just did this real quick but I think it is what you wanted to do.

[Alan Malmstrom]

It sounds to me like the two swords are not one pattern but two and you are trying to cross them and get a nice smooth transition from one to the other right there where they cross together. You might want to play around with the functions under the carving menu called -merge style-clip carving- and -bit optmization. The bit optimization is what I think would work for you.

I just tried and your right you cannot get the same results with images merging together in inverted mode as with regular

Alan

[Alan Malmstrom]

Well the higher part of any hieghtmap is always going to show up no matter if the map is inverted or not. I think the only way to get around that is by having the original images the paterns are made out of and merging them together in another third party program or CarveWright pattern editor and then making a single pattern out of them. I tried many different ways to group things together and stuff and the higher parts of the image always show.

You could just carve the mold by hand after carving too.

By the way I was experimenting with molding materials and found a product called Plaster Cloth in the train hobby section of Hobby Lobby. You take the cloth and submerge it in water and apply it by smoothing it onto whatever you want. It doesn't stick to polyuethane very much I used spraywax for a release agent. Of coarse you might want to put some joint compound in the mold and sand it out a little to make it smooth though before painting. I also brushed a little wood glue over the plaster cloth after it was dry just to make it tougher and that worked pretty good.

Alan

[TerryT]

Wellllll.... maybe not quite right. Alan, you were real close to the answer, infact you said it in your first post. I'll try again this time step by step. Unless I'm missunderstanding this will solve the problem.

Step 1 select your two patterns, in your case swords in mine M-16's. Postition them as you like. In this case crossed. Now, two patterns both the same both same depth, etc.

[TerryT]

Now put one of them into the background. One pattern is set to .250 depth and 100 height. The background one is .45 depth and 50 height.

[TerryT]

Now, click on EDIT from the menu at the top of the page. Then click on SELECT ALL. Now, right click. On the popup menu click on "INVERT PATTERN". Now the tricky part. Since we inverted the patterns the shallowest one (closest to us) is really the one that will be in the background on the positive part when we make one. So, click on the shallowest pattern then click on "Carving" from the menu at the top of the page. Now, select "Clip Carving" and then "Clip carving: Exclusive". This should give you the proper blending of the overlayed pattern.