Does anyone use V-carve software? If so, what has been your experience?

Does anyone use V-carve software? If so, what has been your experience? I’ve downloaded the trial software, but I haven’t gotten the opportunity to try it since my spindle is on order.

Yes George. I am using using Vectric Aspire 8.0 which is pretty the same with V-Carve. You can see the differences @ http://www.vectric.com/products/compare.html
You can test it even without your spindle (or even w/o the whole router) because it has a very nice and useful simulation part. And you will find a LOT of “how to” on Youtube.

@Alex_Paverman Can you give a few examples of what you’ve made with Aspire?

Of course, give some minutes to take a couple of pictures…

Soory for this bad picture. It was taken by-fly with my phone,5 mins ago…

Very Nice!

Aspire/V-Carve is a very powerful CAD/CAM engine but is more like “art&deco oriented”

I’ll have to see if my CNC is compatible with it.

Mine would be more for signs, hence V-carve would best suit my needs. Though I would like to do some 3D.

It probably works well with a 3D scanner

@George_Allen I don’t see why it wouldn’t be compatible. Yes, a scanner can be usefull but there are a lot of 3d models ready made and at sale. Signs you can do all right. In fact, with V-Carve Pro you can do pretty as much as with Aspire with a third of Aspire license price (if you intend to to buy one…) I am not sure if I ever used those functions which make the price difference.

@Alex_Paverman What size endmills did you use for these? Ballnose? Feed/Speed?

I bought Vcarve Desktop for one project and it worked quite well for that — generates very nice G-Code which uses G2/G3 arcs for curves, so movement and cutting is as smooth as your controller/machine allow.