I’m digging into CC Pro, so first off, thanks C3D team for the taste of the good stuff, no going back now. I was wondering if it is possible, or necessary, to stack roughing passes when doing 3D carving. For example, I would like to do a topo map and there is a good bit of one of the Great Lakes as part of the carving, So I think when the calculation is done it extends the time significantly because it is having to remove all that stock down to the low spot which is about 1/3 of the project. I know I could have less water or make the overall project smaller but it is currently where I want it and im trying to reduce cut times with this setup. Ive also toyed around with the feeds and speeds but those changes haven’t made a significant difference. So I got to thinking that if I used a 1/4 end mill to hog away as much as possible, then I could come back in with a 1/8in endmill and the roughing pass for that would be much quicker. Then I could do my final finishing pass with my 1/16 ball and be done. So I guess my questions are below.
does it make sense to try to stack the operations like that?
Does the software recognize multiple roughing passes or is it set up to look for 1 rough and 1 finish?
does it make sense? Yes
in custom software I’m building that’s exactly what I do… 2 roughing passes, once big one with 1/4" inch that hogs away most in multiple steps, and then a 1/8" roughing pass that is a single pass, before going to a ballnose pass for finishing
So i tried stacking a second roughing pass, but it looks like the cutter is going to go from zero, so it will be cutting air for a majority of the time. I tried both setting the stock thickness as top and bottom, but neither made a difference that I could tell. Ive uploaded the .c2d file in case anyone want to take a look.clevelandtopo.c2d (423.6 KB)
Yep, Carbide Create is not flexible enough (yet) to do multiple incremental roughing passes. You could either look into using other CAM tools (e.g. Fusion360 that has “rest machining” options where you can stack as many incremental toolpaths as you need), or start lobbying for the next CC version to support this feature
The “top” or “bottom” setting has no effect on the toolpaths other than telling the program where you will zero on the machine. Basically, if you are setting zero to “top” it tells CC to generate negative Z movements from the Z0 reference plane, and if you set it to “bottom”, it tells CC to generate movements that start from [stock thickness] “altitude” and dig down from there.
