Grain Matching Multiple Assemblies in CABINET VISION [VIDEO]

G’day everyone, it’s Clayton from Planit Canada here and today I’m stoked to chat with you about a simple and efficient solution found in CABINET VISION 2023 which I think is going to make your lives so much easier.

Today we’re going to talk about grain matching, and just how quickly we can grain match all of our doors and drawer faces together in our projects ahead of their optimization.

But I reckon we should just touch on first what grain matching is, and why it can be necessary sometimes.

CABINET VISION is a really clever program. It’s always going to get the most economical cut during optimization. But when we use timber or timber-look panels, we may prefer to have a little more wastage but have the grain of the timber flow across all of the doors and drawers. So, we need to be able to tell CABINET VISION to prioritize grain match over board economy.

Without grain matching, our job might look a little bit like this on screen with the grain changing from panel to panel. Whereas we might want it to look a little bit more like this: a row of cabinets where the grain flows consistently. Vertically or horizontally from each façade to the next, we create this neat, cohesive design.

But it’s super easy to do in CABINET VISION, so let’s jump straight into it.

PRECHECK

The first thing we want to do is check that the material we’re using is set up already to be grain-dependent in our material properties.

It’s super easy to do. I’m just going to close down my job. And from the main splash screen, my home screen, I can click on the material icon in the top left, and then I can find the material I was using for my doors. In this case, I was under the boardstock and I had used the three-quarter solid example material.

I can double-click on the ID number and this will open up the properties for this specific material. I can use the CNC tab here to now pivot between true and false for my grain dependency.

Of course, I would like it to be grain-dependent, so that’s fantastic. We can leave that one there.

Now in CABINET VISION, when we set up a grain-dependent material, it’s going to assume that the orientation is vertical. But of course, we might want sometimes a horizontal grain in our jobs. Well, it’s super easy to do as well.

If we click on the door catalog, we can find the specific door style that we might be using. In this case, I’ve set up a wood grain horizontal.

But if I wanted to make sure that it was set to horizontal, I can double-click on the ID and then on the design and then from this page, I can click on the main design itself and now I can switch between horizontal grain — yes or no. So, we want that to be yes and now when I use this particular door style in my project, it’s going to stay as horizontal grain.

So, there we go. All of those — a couple of those pre-checks have been done. We’re now ready to start doing grain matching in our jobs.

GRAIN MATCHING

In CABINET VISION, there are two ways that we can grand match our materials. We can ask the program to do it automatically, or we can make those changes ourselves manually.

So the first way we can do it: if we click on New Job…and we, from the Job Properties menu that pops up. We click on the Cabinet icon, and then the Doors tab. You’ll notice down here on the bottom right; we have the Grain Match section. If I tick this box, I can choose between two different options: Assembly or Auto Group.

• If I click Assembly, CABINET VISION is going to grain match each Cabinet individually only.
• If I use the Auto Group feature, it’s going to grain-match many different cabinets together in the same row.

So, let’s see that in action.

If I click on Assembly and OK, I’ll begin by drawing up a wall. Cool. Fantastic. I can go to the elevation; the objects and I can put a few different cabinets on my wall.

One, two, three. Fantastic.

Now, when we’re from the elevation view. I can click on this grain match button on the left-hand side. And here you can see CABINET VISION is doing exactly what I asked it to do. And using the assembly per each assembly feature, CABINET VISION is only grain matching the two doors together.

But of course, I’m using a horizontal grain material here, so I might actually like to have all six of these doors grain-matched together during the optimization.

I can pivot between that really easily if I go back to my job and my job properties. The cabinet, the doors… Now I can just toggle to the auto-group feature and hit OK.

And now you can see that CABINET VISION has automatically put these three cases or six of these doors together.

I’m also able to make these changes myself manually.

While I’ve clicked on the grain match button, I can right-click on each of these cabinets and manually remove them from different groups and then create new groups where I can add them to each other.

So, let’s see what that looks like during optimization.

If I click on the S2M Center tab, I’ll be able to run a test optimization and we can see all six of these doors, just how they’ll appear on the sheet.

From the S2M center menu, I can now filter my parts, materials. I can find the oak material that was being used for these doors. And now I can optimize all six of these doors together.

Okay, check out the pattern and voila!

We can see that all six of our doors have been optimized on the sheet ready for the CNC.