Quote Originally Posted by Davek0974 View Post
Ok, so what sort of part would make you say "well thats a F360 job" over "i'll just do that in Vcarve" ??

I can see that working with the 360 view model is good, complex but good, but it seems most stuff can be done with just 2d views?
Real example. I'm a bit embarrassed to talk about it because it seems so trivial compared with the usual projects described, but never mind. My wife wanted some simple dividers to go in some plastic crates to separate whatever it was she was storing. I had some 3mm ply sitting around, so planned to use that. Could have cut flat panels with sloping edges to fit the crates, but wanted something a bit clever. So I added flanges to the divider plates, with tabs on the dividers fitting into tight-fitting slots in the flange pieces. Because of the tapered sides, I could have calculated dimensions but that would have been time-consuming so I drew the dividers with tabs on, then drew the flanges and could "cut out" the slots where the tabs went, and because this was all done in F360, I knew that all the bits would fit - which they did, and they fitted the boxes nicely. I could then take the individual components and lay them out for CAM and 2D cutting. I could have done it in VCarve but, as I say, that would have needed me to do some sums to work out tab and hole positions. As it was, I've no idea of the actual dimensions of the tabs but I could use F360 features to get them equi-spaced, match tab/gap spacing, etc, with very little thought or work on my part. I would use VCarve, for instance, for making an engraved sign where all the work is 2D and the CAM really good for that kind of v-engraving. Horses for courses.

For this kind of work, though, there is one small point where VCarve beats F360 hands down, and that is generating corner fillets for the holes to take rectangular tabs. You can do it in F360 with an add-on, but it's so trivially easy in VCarve. In fact, for my dividers, I ended up exporting DXFs of the panels and flanges and doing the CAM in VCarve. I'm not proud...