Weld and Union

Tips, Tricks and Tutorials for using Sure Cuts A Lot
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craftedge
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Posts: 360
Joined: Tue Jul 05, 2011 10:34 pm

Weld and Union

Post by craftedge »

There are 2 different way to combine to shapes into a single shape in Sure Cuts A Lot & eCAL. One is to use the Weld option in the Style tab, and the other is to use the Union from the Path menu.

The main difference is the Union permanently creates a new shape, while the Weld temporarily creates the new shape when you do a Preview or are actually going to cut your project.

Below is an example of using the Weld option on 2 circles. Select the shapes you want to weld together, and then check the Weld checkbox from the Style tab.

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Now if we do a Preview, you should see what is going to get cut in Red, and you can see the parts that are ignored in gray.

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Because the Weld is not altering the shapes, we can easily rearrange the overlapping shapes if we want.

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When using the Union option from the Path menu, this will combine the selected shapes into a new shape.

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After applying the Union, if you look in the Layers tab, you will see a new single layer with the newly created shape.

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Please note that if you have a lot of shapes set to weld, this may cause a delay when doing a Preview or before it starts to cut as the program will need to compute all the welds on the page at that time.

Also depending on your design, the Weld option may not produce the results you are expecting. For example, if we have the following design with everyting set to Weld.

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When you do a Preview, you will get the following where it will only cut the welded outer squares. This is because the inner circles are overlapping in the squares and are removed.

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In this case, you would want to use the Union, where you union the two circles together, and union the two squares together to get the result as shown below.

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