The options on the Edges tab can have a large impact on the performance of 3-axis toolpaths. The edge options cause various types of automatic boundary curves to be calculated which, depending on the size of the model and the tool, can take significant time to compute.
These are the edge options ordered from best to worst in order of performance:
- Cut to bottom — This option computes no automatic boundary and has no impact on performance.
- Cut selected surfaces — This option computes a boundary between the selected surfaces and unselected surfaces. This is intended for milling a small subset of the surfaces in a larger model (in other words, a feature). When used in this way it should not have a large impact on performance. If you do not have any unselected surfaces, this option behaves the same as Cut top edge.
- Cut top edge — This option computes an automatic silhouette boundary of the part surfaces. Performance is impacted on large models.
- Don't roll — This option computes two automatic boundaries and can have a large impact on performance. Large models and small tools both slow down these calculations. This option is best for simple surface models where the milling must be limited to not roll over the edges along the profile of a feature.
Automatic — The Automatic option follows a set of rules to choose between Don't roll and Cut to bottom. Automatic tries to avoid the computation of Don't roll when it thinks that it is unnecessary and chooses Cut to bottom (no boundary calculation) instead.
Automatic follows these rules:
- Use
Cut to bottom for any of these cases:
- 4- or 5-axis operation
- Roughing operation
- Flowline or Isoline operation
- Corner remachining operation
- Select curves for boundaries has been set on the Stock tab
- A slope has been set up on the Slopes tab
- Remachining option has been selected on the Strategy tab
- Overcut % is not 100 on the Stock tab
- Otherwise use Don't roll.