How to Add Automatic Scribes to Cabinet End Panels Without Manual Adjustments

G’day, how’re you going? I’m Clayton. This is the Planit Canada YouTube channel.
Welcome back to another edition of ‘Your Question to Answered’, the video series where we tackle different questions you have about CABINET VISION and we show you how it works.

So, in our video today, one of our viewers left this question: “How can I add an automatic scribe to my end panels for the floors, the walls, when I’m trying to install it, just to give me a little bit of something to work with?”
It’s actually quite a simple process, but it does touch on two different aspects of CABINET VISION. We have talked about them previously in our videos.

If I say the CABINET VISION Hierarchy and the Object Tree, if you’re a little unsure of what I’m referring to, you can check out this video here, which talks about the CABINET VISION Hierarchy. I warn you now, though, it was early days, so it’s not my best work, and I’m not above addressing the bespectacled elephant in the room… I was going through a weird phase with glasses.

Then, in this video, you’ll be able to see the Object Tree. It talks about how we can create our own end panels. So feel free to check out both of those videos before you delve much deeper into this one.
Otherwise, let’s get into it!

So, what we want to know is how we can add an automatic scribe to our end panels.

So, I’m going to go to the Elevation view, and we’re going to work on this end panel here. We’re just going to do something simple. We want to be able to add an inch to the height of this part and to the depth of this part as well. It’s the exact same process, essentially.

So, we need to try and trick CABINET VISION, almost, so that we can have part settings and assembly settings that are different from one another. And I’ll show you what I mean.

Here’s a room that I prepared earlier… and we’ll go to the wire mode so it’s easier to see.

Now, we’ve talked about this a little bit, and we’ll touch on it again. For you and I, we look at this and we go, that’s a cabinet and that’s a part. But from CABINET VISION’s point of view… Actually, they’re both assemblies, so they’re kind of both cabinets.

This is a cabinet with a top, a back, a bottom, a couple of ends… This is a cabinet too, almost. It just doesn’t have another end. It doesn’t have a back. It doesn’t have a top or a bottom. But it has a finished left end.

So, what that means is currently the part level settings for this end are following the assembly level settings.
So, I’ve clicked on this from the Elevation view. I’m clicking on it as an assembly, which means if I change the height here to be something like 45, yes, the part has changed with it because it’s following the assembly setting.
To illustrate, I’ve got this cabinet here. Let’s say we make this 80 in in height. What’s happened is three parts have changed their height to suit.

So, my left end, my right end and my back have all changed because all three of those parts are currently following this assembly setting.

So, what we want then is that this end panel continues to follow the assembly setting so that we can use this panel like normal, but we just want it to then add on an extra inch automatically.

So, we can remove this… Let’s go back to our kitchen and let’s find that part.

If you’re still feeling a little confused, that’s okay. It’ll make sense as we go through it together.

So, what we want to do is double-click on this end panel that we’d like to change, and we’re going to move me from down here, across, and open up the Object Tree.

So, the Object Tree, we can open up in the bottom left here next to the little home icon. If you’re using an older version of CABINET VISION, you may see the Object Tree up here in the top ribbon.

When we open up the Object Tree, we see a list of all the different settings, in this case, which make up our assembly.

So, because we’re on the assembly view, the assembly level of the CABINET VISION Hierarchy, and we’ve clicked on the Object Tree, CABINET VISION’s giving us all the settings for this assembly and then all the parts which make up this assembly.

So, if I was on this field here, this top assembly field, if I made changes to the DX, DY or DZ value, that’s identical to when we’re changing the assembly settings from our elevation or plan view, like we see here.

So, if I click on the part, for instance, at the moment, because I haven’t told CABINET VISION that this part shouldn’t be following the assembly settings, any change I make on the assembly level, any change I make to the height or to the width of this part here, is automatically going to happen to this part.

However, we can trick CABINET VISION here.

So, if I click on the finished left end and the DY, and let’s say we want to add an automatic inch to this, I don’t want to just change this value to 85, and I’ll show you why.

If I make this value—in fact, let’s just do something very clear—let’s go 90.

Ok… So, I’ve now made this 90, and you can see that CABINET VISION has now added to the height of this part so that it’s now 90 inches. But you’ll notice here it’s telling me that the assembly is 84 inches high.

So, they’re currently not following each other. The problem with this is if now I was to make a change to this value, let’s say 80, the Assembly level changes, but the Part level isn’t changing. It’s going to stay at 90 because, on a lower, more specific level, I have broken that connection and overrid CABINET VISION so that it uses that 90 value instead of whatever our assembly are saying.

So, this is how we can use a formula to create a smarter part.

So, let’s try to very logically, very quickly, break down what this formula needs to be because this is a great tip for you.

If you’re new to CABINET VISION, you’re working it out and you want to be able to tackle these kinds of problems yourself, one of the best tips I can offer is try and, as simply as possible, work out what you’re trying to accomplish in our human terms, okay?

And then translate that into CABINET VISION terms using these settings here.

Ok… I’m a big believer in “you teach a man to fish”.

So now, from CABINET VISION’s point of view, if we look at our Object Tree, I’m telling it, I want the end panel to follow the DY setting of my cabinet and then add-in automatically that extra inch.

So, I’m going to copy this field here. I’m going to click on my finished end. I’m going to click on that DY value again, and we’re going to use an equation.

We’re going to put in the ‘Then’ field here. We’re going to click Ctrl-V and paste it. Then I’m just going to go ‘+ 1’, and now I’m telling CABINET VISION, you work out the DY setting of this part according to what value you get back from our cabinet height, and then you just add on one inch automatically.

We click OK, and now CABINET VISION has made that adjustment.

We’ve now got that formula, and that end panel is a smart end panel. It works itself out according to other settings.
So, if we were to now go back to our Assembly level, and let’s say we make this 90, CABINET VISION changes the part automatically so that it is 91.

And it’s the exact same process for the depth of our part as well.

We’ll just go back to the Assembly level. We would find the value we want here, which is the DZ. We copy that. We click on our finish left end. We see that the DX, in this case, is the value for the width that we want to be changing.

We go equation, ‘Ctrl-V’, ‘+ 1’, ‘Test’, click ‘OK’.

And now, if we go to our 3D view, you see that CABINET VISION has an extra inch on the height and the width of this part.

So, that is the easiest way to do it. We could save this panel now to our catalog, and we don’t have to add those formulas again. Every time we grab this from the catalog, It will automatically have this scribe attached.
Ok. But if I click Return, let’s make this the 84 again.

You will notice, though, however, that that inch, because we’ve genuinely changed the height of this part, it’s visible from the Elevation or Plan view.

We could change where that inch is added. We could move it down below to the floor if we wanted to.
So, to do that, I’m going to click on that part again… we’re going to go to our Object Tree… We’re going to click on the Case and the finish left end…

And here I can change the X, Y and Z values. This is the placement of that part in relation to the assembly level, so I’m going to move it down an inch, which is our Y value here. I’m just going to go minus 1. Ok.
And now, technically, CABINET VISION is going to finish at the right height at the top here, and it’s just going to move it down so that inch is added at the bottom here. So, it’s a little bit more discrete if we would like to do that.

If we’re not happy about seeing that extra inch at all, there is another way that we could tackle this.
If I go to the S2M Center now and I load up the list of all the parts that are in this job, you may not know this, but from the S2M Center view, we can actually make modifications as well to our parts.

These aren’t lasting modifications. They won’t impact what’s in my job already on my plan or elevation view. They only impact that particular visit to S2M Center.

So, if I changed anything here, then I clicked on Plan and Elevation, and then I reloaded S2M Center, I would not see any of those changes that I had made. CABINET VISION would reload this information according to what it sees in the job.

So, just keep that in mind.

And I need to preface this by saying this isn’t going to be the solution for everyone.

I could imagine this is a useful solution if you have just a particular job. So, we’re not talking about a standard you want to use in all of your projects. You just have a particular job which is a pain in the butt, and we need to make the end panels wider or taller for this specific project before it’s nested.

Then, in that case… Load up S2M Center… Sort through the description so you can put them in alphabetical order… Let’s find the finished left end that we were looking at just before.

What I could do is find a representative of all of the different ends I need that need to have a scribe added to them.
Then I could manually change the length and width of this part here, and then I could remove the other finished left ends like so and just add however many of this one I need.

But this is not designed to be a permanent solution. It’s a quick fix to bail you out if you’re working on a tricky job and you just want to make sure you can get the project out of the CNC and keep up production.

Thanks for watching. If you’ve got any questions about what you saw in this video, let us know in the comments below.