For 3D milling you will need a .stl file of the object you want to mill and a vector file as a .dxf

Other vector formats such as .svg or .ai work as well (though you might lose color & layer information that we can import into Vcarve).

Preparing 3D files (CAD)

In this example we’ll make a tray with lovely curved edges from solid wood

As mentioned, we need both a .stl file (3D geometry) and a .dxf file (2D geometry)

First we define the size of our object

Use material at least 50mm bigger in all dimensions than our object (bigger the better). This is mainly for two reasons - firstly you often need room for screws to hold down the material on to the bed of the machine, and secondly it’s likely some cutting will happen outside the boundary of your object (more on this later when setting up the toolpaths in Vcarve). No matter the material type (wood, plastic, metal) the material ideally should be the same size in real life to the digital drawings you are making.

In this example will use material of this size (300mm x 400mm, 25mm thick)

At the moment, this is drawn as a solid block of material - we need to represent it differently - by creating a bounding box of the material size. We do this by creating a 2D rectangle in same dimensions as your actual material. Then create small columns in each corner (can be any size - in the example below they are 10mm x 10mm)

Now extrude them to your prepared material thickness (in this example 25mm)

Now we can place the object within this ‘material’ (bounding box)

Make sure the object is aligned correctly in the x, y and z axes.