Setup
Before you start machining, you must set the part up correctly. This involves retrieving the component, defining a block to represent the raw material, and defining various other parameters (such as the tool geometry and feed rates).
Creating Toolpaths
You can then create a variety of toolpaths, for example:
Area Clearance
- Roughing for general area clearance.
- Rest Roughing to remove the material left by the larger, Area Clearance tool, leaving only areas which require smaller cutters to be re-machined.
High Speed Finishing
- 3D Offset for a high quality surface finish (in that the stepover is constant across all surfaces irrespective of whether they are steep walls or shallow contoured areas).
- Constant Z for steep sides, and, optionally, a continuous spiral.
- Optimised Constant Z for consistent tool loading and the fewest possible sudden changes in direction (3D Offset for flatter areas and Z-level finishing for steeper areas).
Specialist Machining
- Corner machining to clean up corners that occur between non-tangential surfaces.
- Profile machining to profile around the outside of the selected surfaces.
- Projection machining for awkward/less accessible areas and multi-axis machining.
- Rotary machining for cylindrical components.
- Swarf machining for cutting with the side of the tool as the tool follows two curves. You can generate a swarf toolpath from two wireframe curves and use tapered tools as required.
Simulation
There are three modes of toolpath simulation:
- Simulation, which animates the selected toolpath or NC program and "plays" the simulation using either the original, or an alternative, cutting tool.
- ViewMill simulation, which enables you to choose the graphical representation of the stock during simulation.
- Machine simulation, which enables you to load entire machine tools and visualise machine and cutting tool simulation.
You can also use Stock Model to visualise the unmachined stock at any point in the machining process.
Cutter File Generation
Finally, the toolpaths can be output in any of the following formats:
- Standard cutter location format.
- DUCT picture format.
- Postprocessed tape file format (NC program).