A Guide to Panel Stock Materials in CABINET VISION [VIDEO]

G’day everyone, it’s Clayton from Planit Canada here. Today, we’re going to go over one of the basics of CABINET VISION: that is to create a new panel material and make it functional in our CABINET VISION drawings and design all the way through, so that it can be optimized and cut on our CNC machine in the factory.

To start, let’s click on the Material Manager icon. And what that will do is take us to basically the library of CABINET VISION that stores every single one of the materials regardless of their kind…all together in this big library. You can see on the left-hand side that we have different folders that we use to sort and arrange the materials. I’m going to use the demo test folder that I’ve created for today, so that we can see all of our materials together.

Now I’m going to click on New at the top, and what that will do is prompt a new Material Wizard that will just give me several questions to answer to help me create this material. So we want the panel stock. The name…that can be the kind of material we are creating, or the code from the provider we might be using. Let’s go Blue MDF for today. And then under the description we could add something…perhaps like the thickness of the material, the size of the sheet, any other piece of information we might like to use, whether it’s for arranging the materials or for reference later.

Next, we can dictate the unit of issue for the material. So we’ve got sheets, which is fantastic. That’s what we’re after. The length, the width, and the thickness is all correct. We can change these values here. We can also toggle between imperial or metric. So if I click on the metric there. And then I can also change the precision, as well, for the values that I’m placing in camera.

Finally, it will ask us if we want to add a finish, a finish type, or a texture to our materials…and for each face. So we’ve got the face, the back, the edge, and the end where we can add a finish or texture. This can be fantastic because we can use this information to allow CABINET VISION to produce great-quality 3D renderings, or to help us view all the colours together and how they work together in our job when we switch between the finish or texture views. So that information is here. If we want to change it, we can click on the option and we can toggle between the different colours or finishes available. As with the textures, we can click on the three dots again and here we can search a texture that we’ve already imported into CABINET VISION to use here. So I’m going to use the blue-gray. And I can go through and add this to the other sides, particularly for this material because it will be good to have two sides. I will want to add a finish and texture to both the face and the back. When I’m happy with the material like that, I can click finish.

But there might be more that I want to verify or change with my material, so I can search the material-specific properties. If I click twice on the ID number, I arrive at my material property screen. You’ll see that there are different properties that I can open up here and modify. So there’s some that we’ve already addressed, like the size of the material. There are two that we should make sure are corresponding to what we want to do. We’ve got the Optimize and the Grain Dependent options here for this material. With this set to True, we’re able to optimize our materials in S2M center and create the G-code with the files necessary for our CNC machine, so that we can run it in the factory. And this is very important: the grain dependency, if were creating a wood grain material or a veneer, something like that…it’s very important that the grain dependency is set to True, so that we can optimize these sheets with all of our parts grain-matched, and efficiently optimized in the program.

But I’m creating just a generic blue material, so we can set that to false. So now if we click on the return, you’ll see that I can also switch between these different tabs here to see the same information that we’ve addressed. So perhaps I might want to change many materials at the same time. I could find the right tab and go through and change them. Now that we’ve got our panel material, we probably want to create a corresponding edge banding material…and it’s super simple to do. It’s pretty much the same process.

If we click on New, we can change the type to be a banding material. I could change this to be blue or something that is relevant to the material I’m creating. I can choose the thickness of it and how I would like this banding material to be issued. Then I can make sure that the finish and texture is the same as what I’ve already put in there. So I can click finish now, and I have both my panel stock material and my edge banding material ready to be used in the program.

But there is still another step that we need to be mindful of. We need to add it to our Material Schedule. So let’s do that now. I’ll click on return and then we want to click on our Material Schedules…once I’ve opened that up. So a Material Schedule is a list of all of the parts that make up our cabinet and the material that is associated with that specific part. So if i open up some of these categories, you will be able to see what I mean. Here, you can see under the banding category, I have three different edge banding categories available. And these are the materials that I’m using when I use this material schedule. The same can be said with the case. These are all of the different parts that I’m using in my cabinet, and these are the corresponding materials I would like the program to use when I use this material schedule in my job.

At the top here, if I wanted to create a new material schedule for our blue material we’ve created, I could create a new material schedule just like that, and go through and fill out the right options and the exceptions, when necessary. I could also, if I wanted to, find a material schedule that’s pretty close to what I’m already looking for and just click copy. With my copied material schedule, I can change the name to be something i want to see or reference when I create a new project. And here, if I was to open up all of these categories, I could now search the blue MDF that we’ve created. I can click on it…and I can click-and-drag or I could use the arrows down at the bottom here to add them to the right category or box that I’m looking for.

If I add it to the top title, it will change all of the materials that are linked to the title here. So if I added the blue MDF to my assembly, you can see that it’s changed all of the parts that are linked to the assembly properties. What it has left are all of those parts that have an exception to them. To change these parts, I could right-click and I could match it to the parent material like so. I could change or remove the material here, as well, so that it’s out of sight. If I’m happy with all of the exceptions that are available, I can also add the edge banding material I created. So I can search for that. I can click and add that to my banding and it will change the banding material like that.

You can see that I also have exposed an interior part. If I wanted to, I could create a schedule that combines two different materials… for example, a melamine material for my interior…and I could use a nice finished material or color board here under the exposed. But just for the purpose of this example, we will use all of them as the blue. So now that I’ve got the name and the materials assigned to those parts, I can click return. And if I was to open up a new job now, you would see that I have the capacity to add this blue MDF material to my cabinet. So I click on the cabinet icon and the materials. Here is a list of all of the material schedules and I can now see that I’ve got the blue MDF that we’ve created. So if I wanted to assign this blue MDF to my upper material schedules, this is where I could do it.

But of course I might like this blue MDF material schedule to be available for my doors and drawer facades. If I want that, there’s just one more step that I need to follow. i need to create in the material schedule…and the door category, the blue MDF like before. So I can copy this one blue MDF and if I open up the categories, I can create my blue MDF, add him there and then I can add the edge banding too so I’ve got matching edge banding.

So now that I’m happy with my door schedule, I can click on return and now I just want to be able to add the material schedule I’ve created for my doors and drawer faces to the door catalog because there I can assign it to a specific profile or style of door. So I click on the door catalog and you can see that I have a list of all of the door styles that I might have set up already. If I wanted to add this door so that it was available with my slab-style doors, I could click twice on the ID and here I can see all of the door profile properties. Here, under the material filter, I can add the door schedule that I have created. So there’s the blue MDF. So I can add that there, and now when I open up a new job, I’m able to use this blue MDF. Yes, OK, and exit.

So now, if I open up this new job, I’m able to add the blue MDF material to my cabinets, as well as to my doors and drawer faces. So let’s do that. We’ll go through and add the blue MDF. And we’re also able to have a look at how it looks like in the program so we can see the value of setting them up this way. Blue MDF. So now we’ve got our new job. We can add on a wall and add a cabinet so that we can see what it will look like with our new material.

At the top here, between the different render modes, this is where we can toggle between Wire Mode, Fill Mode, or Texture Mode. So if I were to use Fill Mode, it will use the finishes that we added earlier when we created the material. And in the Texture Mode, it will use the texture. Now the fantastic thing about using a material schedule is if I visit my job properties, and then under the cabinet, and we’ll go to Materials… I can modify, just for this job, the material schedule. That’s to say, if I wanted to, I could manually change all of the cabinets which use this schedule so that, for example, if every single back used a different material… perhaps if I wanted a back that had a thinner thickness here, I could add in a different material that had that thinner thickness here, so that instead of changing in every single one of my cabinets all of the parts manually, individually, I could just change it here and it would change all of the cabinets which are using this schedule.

And it’s as simple as that. We can create a new material, add it to our material schedules, and perhaps to the door catalog too. Afterwards, it’s ready to be used in CABINET VISION in our project with all of the design optimization.

Thank you very much for listening. We’ll see you next time.

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