Rudi Reindeer

Welcome to the Labs sessions! We love to make and share projects with our community and enjoy nothing more than providing you with FREE monthly CNC projects that you can download and cut for yourself!

Each project comes with its own video for you to watch telling the story of what I am making from start to finish. It includes technical software footage, machining each part in the Labs and finishing the project, and as an added bonus, I throw a few tips in based on my experience! We would love to see what you turned this project into so please share what you’ve made on the Vectric Forum.

In this month’s “In The Labs” Christmassy sessions, Beki shows us how to make Rudi reindeer as a buddy for Snowman and Nordic Santa to join the family of two-sided projects created by Beki over the years. Inspired by Christmas cartoon characters, this cute reindeer is a fun way to help you decorate your home or create gifts for your friends and family, or for the more experienced users looking for ideas for your Etsy shop or to keep your kids busy helping with your Christmas crafting. Why not make your own family of two-sided Christmas critters to brighten up your mantel, spruce up your workshop, or create a unique chess set using all our double-sided characters!

Beki shows you how easy it is to create Rudi using simple shapes and double-sided tools in Aspire. Keeping the building blocks of the model to hand, she uses the create shape tool to quickly design the hooves, body, gloves, face, eyes, ears and nose and cropping his round feet using the split component tool to make him a stand-alone decoration. Beki shows how she created the fur texture using various sculpting tools and with the enhanced “show full model” option of version 11.5 she demonstrates how to sculpt individual components whilst having full visibility of the full Rudi model.

Making his 3D smile using the extrude tool to blend flat cross sections into a subtracted and recessed shape. With all of the individual elements modeled Beki uses her favorite modeling tool to “create a component from a visible model” to create the final composite, whilst still having access to all of the components that the model is built upon. With this being a two-sided project Beki can easily take elements from the design and copy them over to the other side of the job all at the click of a button, where the software will flip the parts according to the flip direction she set. Beki show’s you how she set up her levels to include 3D tabs to hold the model to the material whilst its being machined as well as sharing a handy tip on how to avoid a cusped seam where she creates a negative base height to ensure the tooling machines below the zero plane. To ensure the two sides are aligned when the material is flipped over Beki shows us how to use the asymmetrical dowel placement method to ensure there is only one possible way that you can align the material to the spoil board during the flip process. To finish she then hand sands to remove the tabs and Rudi is ready for Santa’s sleigh!This project is available for both Aspire and VCarve users, where Aspire users can explore the building blocks that Beki created to build the finished model. For VCarve users we have included the Top and Bottom V3M files that you can import and create your own file too!

If you want to learn more about two-sided machining then check out the following tutorials to get you started:

Introduction to Two Sided Machining: https://www.vectric.com/support/tutorials/aspire?category=two-sided-machining&video=introduction-to-two-sided-machining

Two Sided Marlin: https://www.vectric.com/support/tutorials/aspire?category=two-sided-machining&video=two-sided-marlin

This FREE project comes with the file(s) for you to download from your V&CO account along with a PDF document that highlights some of the key important steps to help you get through your project. For those of you yet to try our software packages, why not download our FREE trial software with these project files and give it a go!

We love to see what you make so whatever your seasonal style, try out one of the projects for yourself then share your creative Christmas inspiration on the Vectric Forum or tag us on our socials.

Merry Christmas Making!

Which Vectric software do I need to be able to open the free project files?

Versions 11+ of the software

We’ve recently updated your V&CO portal account to include all of the free content available to you in one place. To download the free project files and the full instructions for this project or to take a look at all of the other free content available to you simply login to your V&CO account below:

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