Surfaces: The Ultimate 3D Toolpath Setting

DAN PACIFIC: My name is Dan Pacific. I'm a technical sales specialist for what is, I guess, considered the old legacy group of the Dell cam products. I support PartMaker for Swiss mill, turn mill, feature cam for mill, and some power shape for modeling for manufacturing. And then I also dabble in Fusion as well.

So I'm going to go through, essentially, a lot of tips and tricks that I use for generating 3D tool paths, some stuff that I think is pretty common knowledge. I'm going to just open you up to a little bit of how I think when I look at a part and I try to process that part and some of the little tricks that I use to get that exact tool path that I want. So coming from the background that I do, I deal with a lot of precision machining. So that was the area of expertise that I had for a very long time.

So taking that precision machining where you basically have to have the exact type of tool path that you want down to every last little individual move to a mill-based process or even on a turn mill where you're trying to replicate these big 3D machining projects. I wasn't liking a lot of the things that I was getting directly out of many of the software that I was using. So I have a wealth of experience with a bunch of different cam systems. I started with master Cam in 2006, used that for a very long time.

Joined the team Dell cam team in 2015 using PartMaker, slowly worked into FeatureCAM. Once we integrated it all and started using Fusion. I've kind of had my hand in a bunch of different systems. And they all have a very underlying way that they deal with 3D tool paths, right? They are very unique and little unique butterflies out there. They all have their own little things that they do very, very well. But underneath all that, they all start in the same area. I also have a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, so if you want to talk to me about grappling, we can do that too.

So the lineup for today is going to be pretty simple. We're going to start with some very, very basic stuff, some that you're basically already doing today that you don't realize is mostly using surfaces to derive the exact tool path you want, right, so patchwork. Anytime you patch a hole, you're basically blanketing a surface to get that desired tool path that you want. So that's where I'm basically going to start at.

We'll dig a little bit deeper into that patchwork. Then I'm going to talk about check surfaces, drive surfaces, and then iso curvatures in surfaces. So at the end of the day, the surface essentially doesn't matter. There's two things that matter with that. Is the surface measurable? And what are the u and b curves in that surface? So those are the two things that you basically want to pay attention to when you're cleaning up any surface. And I'll go into some examples on just about every single one of these things.

So again, I cover just about every single one of these. There's a lot of products. They all do everything different. They have different interfaces. They all react differently in certain areas. But again, underlying, they're basically the same-- I forgot to take that slide out-- basically the same kind of underlying method.

So patchwork is going to be the first one that we talk about. So I have a specific example in here of a part where we're going to do some 3D machining on this part. I want to look at it. But I don't want to just blanket everything and machine out the entire cavity. I don't want the tool dipping into all these holes. I want to get a nice consistent surface finish first and then follow everything back up to clear out all these small cavities, right? So we want to cut down on a lot of the time that it's taken us to machine and finish this part and have a smooth, uninterrupted cut around the entire radius of this part first.

So we're going to look at the customer challenge that they had. What kind of success is going to dictate a good tool path? Look at the good tool path and then how we got to that success criteria from there.

So this is a little cap that goes over a hub, pretty simple part. You typically wouldn't machine this part from scratch. You would probably cast this part and start from that type of ground. But if you're going to prototype it first, you need to make a one off.

So in this particular case, if I just blanketed a 3D tool path and roughed everything out on this part and then tried to get a consistent surface finish around all of these little areas, I'm going to have a ton of interrupted cuts. That tool is going to be disengaging and reengaging all over the place, and it's going to show. So what we need to do is make that a decent surface for us to then be able to work from.

So this is like we're starting at the basics here, right? How do I get a good tool path here? If I just 3D surface everything, it's going to want to dip into all those cavities. There's nothing that I can really tell it to do with a tool path setting that would stop it from dipping in those cavities.

But if you cap every single one of those surfaces, we then have a clean dome that we can then start from. So something like this, I mean, you could do this a variety of different ways. The workflow in this we'll talk about in Fusion and take a look at a couple of tips and tricks that you can actually use to make sure that you're doing it the right way.

But essentially, most cam systems, you're going to cap surfaces. You're going to cap holes. You're going to cap a lot of things just to get a good consistent tool path going all the way around this. So what this is going to do is have us have a nice surface finish that we start with. Then we go back in, we rough out all those pockets, and then we go and do some of our finishing tool paths in there to clean everything up.

So this is basically the workflow as it's done in Fusion. So we've machined everything out. I want to rough out that entire thing, go through and put my radial finishing tool path on, and then follow it up with another roughing tool path to clear it all out.

Something that I'm sure a lot of people in here are probably already doing. So I figured this would be the best place to start. Simple, right? Good start? Nothing too crazy? Didn't lose anybody yet?

So there's a lot of ways to patch a hole, right? You punch a hole in dry wall, you could basically just slap mud over it. You could cut a square out, put a backer two by four there, screw it in, put netting over it, patch it. Or you could just slap a bunch of other stuff on there or even tape a painting over top of it, right? There's a lot of ways you could patch a hole.

The same way that you could patch a hole that you punched in your wall, there's also a lot of different ways that you could patch a surface and how that surface interacts. So a lot of these specific examples are different things that you would have available to you through most patching surfaces that you have. Specifically, in Fusion, you have a lot of these examples on here to be able to get these holes correct.

No continuity. So understanding G is the curvature of two lines connecting. So there's actually it goes up to G3, but G3 is one that you don't typically find that people actually need to use that much. Obviously, no G is the lines do not intersect whatsoever. G0 would be if we have two radiuses, and we just bringing them together, we'll have two separate radiuses that just connect at any point in time.

So there's actually going to be no continuity. You want to think of this as if we patch a hole and we just slap a plane right over top of that hole. So I have an example of this with this particular tool path that we looked at. Because if you're not paying attention, you can actually just slap a plane on top of a lot of areas. And then you would end up with a lot of weird straight line moves in that particular tool path.

Tangent is probably the most commonly used one. And then G2 curvature has a complete continuous radius from one curve to the other. Both curves that are meeting both have a continued relationship all the way through. Where tangent will just be wherever these two radiuses meet, they'll just continue.

So when you're patching some of these surfaces, and you're trying to pay attention to some of the continuity that's involved with them, there's two surfaces to pay attention to here. So you want to imagine that there's actually two lines. That common line has the top surface with a line and then a side surface with another line.

Now if you're patching them, you're not necessarily sure which line you're picking and which surface you're going to be tangent to. So in most cases, you would have a choice of switching to which one you actually want to be tangent to, like what surface you're going to pick. But in the case where you have a bunch of different areas where you're all patching it, and it's a variety of different surfaces, you want to just pay attention to the one that's going to be the radial surface around this entire part.

So what you can actually do is jump into some little bit of tricks that I actually do where I'll take a model that I've actually brought into HSM, Fusion and unstitch the actual surface that I want to pay attention to. So what this allows you to do is isolate those services on their own, so that now when you actually go through and patch that surface, you're only picking one line. So there's no longer two lines for you to pay attention to with that surface. You know that you're exactly tangent to the only visible line that's there. Then when you're done, you can just stitch everything back together and move on.

So if you notice in this menu up at the top where you pick basically that you want to use that G1 curvature, there's actually an option missing to where if you selected this off of the model itself, you would be able to pick which common line you're picking from. So it'll show you, all right, we have this surface. We have this surface. There's basically two lines here. Which line do you want to have as a reference? But if you hide everything and you just use that one line, you only have one surface to be tangent to.

So how does this actually affect the tool path to where we can see a basic visible difference? I hope it shows pretty well on this screen. So if you notice right where that hole was on the dome, you can actually see where that hole was where it was capped. So that's just a regular plane being stitched over top of that hole.

So instead of having a smooth transition back and forth across this entire surface, it actually draws just a straight line across with that tool path because it's not actually tangent to those surfaces that we had in there. Something like this might not make that big of a deal because it's a simple part. But depending on how you're stitching some of these things together, that might be an errant move that'll show where that tool path might gouge a little bit as it runs over that hole and leave a little bit of marring when you're going to finish it.

So getting out of the simple patchwork, we're going to get into some collision surfaces. So something that I probably use more often than not is the ability to use a collision surface to dictate where and when my tool path stops. So as far as containment fields go, you basically have two options in your tool path settings.

You could draw a boundary, which is going to contain the tool path in an xy plane. And you could set a z limit to your tool path. These are your two most common containment fields, right? You want to stop the tool path at a certain point, you draw a circle around it. You chain that as your boundary. Or you want to set a certain type of depth into that field where it's going to stop the tool path either below a certain surface or above that specific z value.

Anytime you introduce an area you want to stop the tool path that is not in line with either a plane or xy surface or a z level limit, you're going to run into some issues and interrupted cuts when it comes to that specific surface. So where this comes into play is when you introduce any type of multi axis tool path. So fourth axis, we're running around a turn mill. Five axis, we're trying to do some machining. And I want to have specific limits that kind of organically flow through the part without being able to set a z or a boundary from there. You might be able to tweak some stuff with mixing and matching both of them together. But that's going to give you a very rigid hard stop in certain areas.

So the example that I've used here is I had to do some port milling in FeatureCAM, which is not necessarily something that you do in FeatureCAM. But if you hack and chop surfaces enough, you can get it to do it pretty well. So the challenge was we have a specific tool path where we're not going to be aligned with our axes that we're cutting from. We need to tilt the tool. And we need to roll a lollipop cutter in the middle of this port and have it stop halfway down the port.

Well, the port itself, if we stop it halfway down, at z, I'm going to have a ton of interrupted cuts all the way around trying to finish it. And there's no way I can really contain a boundary around this because the boundary is going to have a bunch of interrupted cuts with it too. So when I go to actually stop this tool path, I need it to be at a specific angle that the engagement of the tool is at.

So these are some examples of if you tried to use some z limits and some xy limits to contain that tool path. So it's obviously not looking pretty good. And even in some cases, it's blowing through the part right there. So we have some limitations of where it's going to.

And you would find this in a lot of different cam systems that you were trying to generate tool paths with, right? Every time it does a interrupted cut, which you can see here on the right side, you have all of these little moves at the end that aren't necessarily circling around the entire port, but they're stopping in certain areas. And it's wanting to retract back to a safety move every time it has one of those interrupted cuts.

So in order to get a good, clean tool path in one of these tight areas, you need a good, consistent flow of the tool path. You need this to not stop at all. Anytime that it has a retract, it's going to want to do some kind of safety move or some kind of interrupted cut or run straight from one side to the next, which in most cases, isn't going to give us a great tool path to begin with anyway.

So from here, this is where I introduced a check surface. And this is something that I do very commonly in a variety of different ways to where if I want to stop a 3D tool path in a certain containment field, I will basically build a box of check surfaces around it to stop it. There's a lot of ways to stop a tool path or contain it. This is just my madness of when I get into using a lot of these things.

Again, this class is to open you up to just using something different to be able to generate a lot of these 3D tool paths. So when we get into these check surfaces, and I introduce a stop to exactly where I want that tool path to go, well, now I can match the engagement of that tool, and it's going to use that check surface as a hard stop. So now when it sees that it's going to engage with that specific tool, it knows that the tool path's no longer good. We're going to end the tool path where it's at. And then we're going to retract and get out of there. And it doesn't generate anything past it from that point. This was actually it was a nice tool path. I was very surprised that came out as well, something where we had a nightmare before.

But this is an interesting one to look at because this has a spiral to it. So where we stop on one side of the port is not in line where we need to stop on the other side of the port. So this is where this kind of check surface comes into play where we need to actually define the angle of the spiral based on our step down along with the angle that we're engaging the tool from.

So these multi-axis tool paths, you run into a lot of specific scenarios like this where you can see here how the tool path spirals down. And if I'm looking at it from the side, it's rolling down at two angles simultaneously. So for me to just dump a check surface in there, it's not actually going to stop the tool path in the right area.

What you actually need to do for this particular example is draw the check surface in exactly where that tool path you want it to end. And then we need to select the tool path and tilt it to match how that tool path's rolling down. It's a little bit of a tricky situation of finding exactly where you want to limit it to. You're moving things around. You're rotating the surface in a couple of different ways to find that sweet spot of exactly where you want that tool path to stop.

I probably should've picked a better color than orange and pink to show that. But you can see that the tool path is not-- the check surface is not flat to any one side. It's twisted a little bit to match how that tool's engaging.

So something where if you've ever run into a weird situation where you're like you don't know how to contain a tool path, a lot of times, you could basically put it in a box, right? And that box could be whatever shape that you want it to be. It doesn't have to be a four-sided box. It could be an organic shape to that box.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: So FeatureCAM actually allows you to do, which is something that's really nice, is you can snap a geometry line to a tool path. So as this is coming in, these are all snap points that I could actually draw off of. So what I could do is I could find the midpoint of where that tool path's at to get the angle it's coming down, surface straight across, yeah, grab it, twist it, put it in the right position, and you get a good spot.

You can also, yeah, fudge with it a little bit. If the angle is off a little bit, you might get a little errant move at one spot like up at the top because it might see that it can still engage the tool there. So if you twist it a little bit more, you find the right area where you need to have a hard stop.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah. No. It's just in there wherever you have it. That's why when you're going from both sides, I would have two separate surfaces, one coming in from the top, right? Because we're coming in from a different angle. And then we're coming in from a different angle. And the engagement of both of those are going to be off a little bit. So you're going to have a little bit of overlap between where those two surfaces are going. But it's going to be a lot. I mean, this is a pretty up there example as far as stopping a tool path. I thought it was a good one because I just worked on it. But it just shows that you can basically end a multi-access tool path in a funky area with it being a continuous tool path up to a very hard stop of a point.

So once you have those two nice check surfaces built in there, you actually get two really nice tool paths from it, so one coming from the top, one coming from the bottom, almost no retracts from it. And again, we're looking at a system that is not designed for port machining, right? So I'm sure if you wanted to mess around a little bit more in HSM and Fusion, you could get to generate some type of clean tool paths throughout one of them doing some of this work as well.

So once it's all done, you can simulate everything. This example was just in FeatureCAM for a customer. So a [INAUDIBLE] table moving the top of the part we did with actually no access limitation. So that thing is just running around like a cowboy on a bull.

But then once you get to the bottom part of it, the way that you define how you engage the part, you can start it as a three axis tool path and then only use the multi-axis once you start to notice that the tool path is going to start gouging from that particular point. So that one is a little bit more realistic of how you would do a port anyway. Start with the three axis. Once you start to see a little bit of that motion, then you would start tilting it and running it from there. That was just like a fun one.

So that with check services, the thing that actually drives your tool path is a drive surface. So what we are actually selecting to generate a lot of these tool paths are considered or called drive surfaces in most cases. So one of the ones that has a pretty unique value to it is the Swarf tool path.

So in most cases, you have some surfaces that you want to generate. And typically, behind the scenes what happens is we take that surface or the model that you're using, we turn into a mesh. We take the cutter that you're using, the geometry of that, we turn that into a mesh. And then you triangulate everything of those two meshes meeting together. And that's how a 3D tool path is generated.

In the cases of a lot of multi-axis tool paths, you're introducing something what's called u and v iso curves. And that's where the Swarf comes into play, which highlights that best, I would say, as an example. And as I was putting this together, I realized that a Swarf is actually called a chip in the UK, so there's a fun example. You guys are a tough crowd.

So I had another customer challenge. A customer that I work with pretty closely, they're in an office around the corner from us, but they make scopes on top of rifles. And one of the things that they wanted to do was have a continuous finish around this scope as it was all mounted together.

So they actually built a fixture. They mount the scope together. And I changed some of their model just for purposes for them. And then they want to run a tool path all the way around this scope in a continuous fashion, so it's a non-interrupted cut all the way around this.

Based off of this model, I would absolutely never be able to do it. There's nothing on here that actually gives me any type of good drivable surface to be able to have that tool path without it running all over the place. So one of the things that you can actually do is getting into the field of just creating your own surfaces. So in this customer's case, this is exactly what they want. I do it in Fusion too.

So a continuous fourth axis motion all the way around leaving a beautiful finish on this part, right? But based off of the model that we just had, there was nothing that we would actually be able to do to generate that. So taking a drive surface, but then also sprinkling in a little bit of a check surface into generating a tool path, right, taking what we just learned with limiting tool paths with a check surface, and then also knowing how some of these drive surfaces work, well, this is the anatomy of this tool path.

So this is the drive surface that I created by ripping it off of the model, right? Draw it. You use a ruled surface to make it. If you want to talk about specifics on how I make a lot of surfaces, we can get into that. But if I just have this as a drive surface, that Swarf tool path is going to look at this and it's going to realize, in some cases, that it can hit both at the same time. And then it's going to have a lot of confusion built into the tool path when it tries to actually do this.

So there's no actual multi-axis going on in it until you introduce a check surface. So now we have a drive surface rolling all the way around that part. We have a check surface in the middle of that part that tool path has to avoid.

So when this tool path goes through, it's only following these two specifics through the cam system. So this is something that I looked at and I wanted to replicate across the board because I didn't want to get into too specifics with only showing one system doing one thing. So I wanted to replicate it across the board. One of the things I did notice that Fusion does not allow you to put a check surface in a Swarf tool path. So that being said, there's other things you could do with this drivable surface.

But I'll talk about why this actually works in a second here. So in Swarfing tool paths, we talked about the meshable surfaces and how they work. But then there's also these underlying curvatures that you don't necessarily see called these UV iso curves.

So these are actually what control a lot of the multi-axis in tool paths, right? They're looking at the underlying UV curvature of the surface itself. So depending on how you actually draw a surface, you could totally jack up trying to do a multi-axis tool path for one of these.

So if the case that I did, let's say, this is my clean surface. So this is power shape if anybody's ever seen that. This is the good surface. So you can see you have U and V, right, and how they kind of run up, and then they match the radius going all the way around. So this is it's a sweeping surface all the way from start to finish.

You could also draw this very same surface by basically laying a plane over top of it and then just trimming out that specific area. And then what this gives you is a bunch of cross sections. So that tool path itself is going to look at these underlying U and V curves and try to follow them with the tool. And you're going to get all these staggered moves going around that particular surface. And you're going to look at it but not necessarily know why it's driving a terrible, terrible tool path on top of it. Most cases, it's going to be the underlying UV curves from it.

So depending on how you go through and you create these tool paths, it's something you want to be able to take great care in. Specifically in something like power shape, what you would typically do is if you do a complete closed loop between all the curves that you're creating, it'll sometimes try to make a patch and then chop it out. But if you leave one section open, it'll, a lot of times, take that and make a ruled surface all the way around. But that's something specific to this system. It might be different in SolidWorks, Inventor, and everything else.

Yeah. Yeah. That gives a much better result most times. So if you're not sure what the UV curvature is and you're using something like Fusion, there's actually controls in here for you to find out what the actual UV curvature is in a diagnostic mode for that surface. Something that's good to take a look at first if you're having some issues with the tool path, you can basically find them by digging around a little bit and seeing how that surface was created.

But in this case, so we have a Swarf tool path that we want to do. We don't have the ability to add some check surfaces into here. But what we do have the ability to do is basically create what's considered a wireframe Swarf.

So you can select this particular surface that we created. Or in any case, you could just do geometry as well and get to the same exact result. And you create your two contour chains. And what that does on underneath the surface is basically creates a ruled surface with those correct UV curves from there. And it gives you your nice tool path inside Fusion without having the need for a check surface.

So you have your two. A wireframe Swarf basically works in the way of where the one curvature dictates where the tool's going to go. And then the axes follows it on the second curvature. So behind the scenes, it basically just creates a ruled surface that it follows. So in some systems, there's a follow surface laterals where it'll basically try to create the correct surface underneath the surface itself, underneath the tool path, not the surface. But in here, with the wireframe, it basically just makes that ruled surface for it to follow.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah. Yeah, because it's not actually using the surface itself. We just use the surface as a guideline to pick those two curves. Say I didn't want to use this. I didn't want to create a surface. If I just had the geometry to pick, then I could just pick that as well.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah. I already had it done in one. So I just copy and paste them into this to show how it would work. What you can't do is you can't do a continuous chain all the way around. Remember we talked about that a little bit, right? If you have a closed loop, it makes a plane and it tries to chop out that shape. So you can see I have a little split up here in the continuous tool path. And then you just have to give a little bit of an extension on how it's tangentially leading in and out. Just a little bit of a trick to consider.

So right, no surface needed. If you had something like, say, there was a little checkbox that said, check surface, I wouldn't doubt that we could basically run the same exact tool path using the drive and the check surface. And then we bring everything in, and then we get our nice clean, continuous motion from here.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: The hard to lock it out?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah. It wanted to tilt the tool path a little bit on here. But it came out decent. I mean, this is something where we generated this tool path without digging into any type of specific settings in the tool path. If you really wanted to tweak deeper and deeper, you could dive into specific settings and getting into everything from there to really hammer out how it's moving.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Perfect. So knowing what we know now with patchwork, drive surfaces, and check surfaces, I'll show you part that I did for Mazak where we kind of bring everything together.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Looks pretty, right? So this was the customer challenge. So I do a lot of work for a lot of machine tool partners. They want to do trade shows. They want to get crazy with the different motions of the machine, and they really want to show off a lot of the functionality in that regard.

And then even with different customer challenges, right, I do a lot of benchmarks. And on the surface, you see a lot of these things that look clean once they're finished. But if you dig underneath a lot of the actual tool path structures themselves, this is what a lot of those tool paths look like, in my eyes, at least. So this was the Mazak tool path with all the surfaces shown that I've used to tweak out a lot of that motion, right?

So this is something that a lot of people won't consider. And they'll try to tweak with tool paths and get everything moving and going and stretching them out to the limit of seeing what they can fiddle with as well. Where I kind of just dive head first into using tool paths and surfaces for containment.

So with a lot of these tool paths that were on there, the one that specifically stands out is machining the outside surface of this part, but then also being able to straighten the axes out and dip into that little cavity in the tool. Now if you look at this part, you would think, like, all right, that's going to be a little bit difficult to do. How do I kind of dictate how this tool path reacts that specific way?

So I'm sure in most cases, most people in this room, before taking this phenomenal class, would try to mess with the multi-axis options that you would have and try to find some weird tweaking angle of how limitations would work from there. But in reality, you got to start here. This is what the anatomy of that tool path looks like once you pull the sheets off the bed, right?

Knowing what we now know about the UV curvature of surfaces, I'm driving what's considered an iso line tool path in FeatureCAM, which would be a flow line tool path in Fusion. The surface itself comes to a C clamp. So we're following the traveled direction of the surface around that particular part.

So as we're rolling around it, we're following the circle. And then as it straightens out, the tool straightens out on that little section. It's nothing fancy. But if you tried to tweak that out in a multi-axis tool path, you'd be banging your head against the desk for a very long time. And knowing where we want to contain that tool path, I have orange check surfaces built in there. So through a lot of these examples, I put the dark blue as the drive surface and the orange as the check surface that I use to generate that tool path.

And then this one is more like a coin flip. You could do a variety of different things here. On the left side, there's a little blue boundary, which is just containing my tool path, an x and y. And then on the other side, it's just a check surface, which is I'm selecting the whole surface of the barrel of that particular part and then just dumping in a surface where I want it to stop. This one's just me being like a mad scientist with trying to do the check surfaces in most cases.

But then you get into specific areas on this part too where they're doing a lot of they wanted to break specific edges all the way around on certain edges that didn't exist as well. So in this particular case, we had to do an edge break around the barrel where there was no edge break and have it follow and stop in certain areas where it wasn't going to collide with all these overhangs on the part.

Once you unravel how these things are running, well, I reused the surface that I had before as a check service on where to stop it. And then you could see the blue Swarf drive surface for how that tool path's engaging from there. So again, these are not to say that this is the best way possible to machine a lot of these things. But this is just another option that you have in the bag to dip into when you're controlling a lot of these 3D tool paths.

So again, this one, right, brings us all the way back to patchwork. If I'm trying to finish the inside of this, and I'm trying to have that side of the ball mill engage how that part rolls up here on the side, if I have all of these interrupted areas on the surface where it sees it's going to engage that tool, it's going to want to try to dip them away from there. It's going to make a bunch of weird interrupted cuts, even if it's just the side of the tool.

So in this case, you'd be able to patch everything, roll it into the surface, have a nice clean underlying area where we can drive that tool path back and forth on it. So the last thing that I'll kick into is something that I was going to rip out of the slide because it dips a little bit too deep into some of the madness. So this is an air foil blade that was done on a CTX gamma.

And when I originally had gotten this surface that they wanted to cut this, there was going to be a lot of problems, right? There's a lot of specific undercutting the radiuses or separate surfaces from the actual body of the air foil blade itself. So I knew that I was going to have a lot of trouble trying to control the tool path right out of the gate because there's nothing really where there's a good center point to tip the tool access to and nothing really for me to control how it's engaging. In most cases, I prefer to use some sort of iso line driven tool path for any type of fourth axis tool path or above. So in this case, I knew I had to recreate the surface because all these are going to be completely interrupted cuts all the way around unless I wanted to three axis them on one side, flip it over, and do a three axis tool path on the opposite side.

So in this particular instance, I used just something in power shape to rip a curve and basically rebuild the surface from here. So one of the nice things that power shape lets you do is create a curve from a selected edge. And I can see all of the points that I pulled off of that edge from there.

And the spacing on all these radiuses is not necessarily what I would like to use to create a new surface because the spacing is off. Right? They're not equal spaced. I know if I create a radius on here, it's going to be choppy no matter what type of tool path I put on top of it.

So what you could do is you could force those points on that curve to basically redistribute to be more evenly spread across. So from here, I could take something that had just about I'd say 40 something points. You could blow it up to use something that has about 500 different points. And it's going to evenly distribute those points all around that radius giving me a good, clean curve to work from to begin with. And then when I extend that surface and build it from there, it's going to have a lot more underlying data for that busier curve that I started with.

So this gave me through messing around a little bit trying to get a good, clean surface, it's one of the reasons I was not going to dip too deep into this one. But it was a good example on just how that one tool path wasn't going to work clearing this up unless I had a good, consistent, clean tool path. So after this was created and we needed to basically finish this thing, I have so many more points.

If you've sat in Craig Chester's five axis class too, in most cases, the more points you feed a lot of these machines, the smoother the axial motion is going to be. And in this case, I basically blew up the tolerance on that entire tool path along with having all of those specific points around the curve to make a nice seamless transfer for the surface itself.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah, you basically do a curve on one end, a curve on another end. And you can either loft it between the two, or you could basically create a bunch of ruled surfaces across it manually by projecting line down onto each surface and then filling them all in from there.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yep. Yeah, there's a couple things in power shape which make it a very unique system for modeling for manufacturing and point distribution is one of them. A lot of very intricate surface creation where if you just say, you want to take that surface, this surface, and one or two ruled surfaces, it'll actually build the entire thing for you without you having to tweak much around from it. It's a great tool, something that I find myself like dipping into a lot when it comes to prepping for creating one of the tool paths.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: So these have in power shape, you could do 500, 500 evenly placed, and you can map what points actually connect with each other. So if you want to sit there and stitch together each individual point, I mean, it depends on how clean you want to make that tool path, right? You could sit there and actually stitch all those things together.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah, chop, chop, chop, chop, curve, space the mill out.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah. Yeah, that'll be perfect.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAN PACIFIC: Yeah, exactly. That's what a lot of this is based on reverse engineering a surface, right? Because modeling for manufacturing is you don't always get the cleanest surfaces. You always did the cleanest models. You're always going to have to do some kind of manipulation to get either just a good tool path on anything.