Make it cuttable by a real tool.
Upload artwork. Get paths a CNC or rotary engraver can follow at the detail your bit allows.
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Real vector craft — see for yourself
Your trace lands as genuine, editable SVG paths — the same clean vector work behind Clearly’s bee-ecosystem murals. Infinitely scalable, every path editable, ready for Cricut, print or the web. No embedded pixels, no tangled auto-trace mess.
Hand-authored on the Clearly canvas · editable SVG, not raster.
The bit cannot cut a corner sharper than itself
This is the constraint that separates engraving from every other job here, and it is purely geometric. A 3 mm end mill sweeps a 3 mm circle as it travels, so the tightest inside corner it can produce has a 1.5 mm radius — no matter what the drawing says. Send a design with sharp interior corners and the machine will simply round them, silently, and the result looks softer and less precise than the file. A V-bit escapes this by cutting at varying depth to reach a true point, which is why lettering is usually V-carved rather than pocketed. Knowing which you are doing changes what artwork is worth sending.
What a CNC engraver needs from the file
- Minimum inside radius
- Half the tool diameter. A 3 mm bit cannot beat a 1.5 mm corner.
- V-carve
- Variable depth, true sharp corners. The usual choice for lettering.
- Pocketing
- Flat end mill, constant depth, rounded interior corners.
- Single-line fonts
- Engrave along a stroke — far faster than filling an outlined letter.
- Paths
- Closed for pockets and profiles; open paths engrave along the line.
- Material
- Brass and acrylic hold fine detail; soft wood tears out below ≈1 mm.
How it works
Line art and logos convert most usefully. Photographs are a raster engrave job instead.
Check the tightest interior corner in the preview against half your tool diameter.
Import the SVG to VCarve, Fusion or Easel and assign V-carve or pocket per region.
Free watermarked preview. $10 unlocks the clean, exclusive commercial file — emailed, no account, no subscription.
FAQ
Because a round tool cannot produce a corner tighter than its own radius. The machine follows the path as closely as its geometry allows and rounds the rest. Either use a smaller bit, or V-carve, which reaches a true point by varying depth.
A pocket clears an area to a constant depth with a flat bit, leaving rounded interior corners. A V-carve uses a pointed bit and varies depth so the cut narrows to a true point — sharp corners, variable depth. Lettering almost always looks better V-carved.
A normal font is an outline that has to be filled, so the tool clears the whole letter body. A single-line (stroke) font is one pass down the centre of each stroke. On a long engraving job that is the difference between minutes and hours.
Not as vector. Photographs are engraved as raster, where the head sweeps line by line varying power. Vector engraving follows paths, which needs distinct edges — line art, lettering, logos.