In this lesson, we'll use the 3D contour and ramp toolpaths. After completing this lesson, you'll be able to: create a 3D contour toolpath, create a 3D ramp toolpath, and demonstrate how to optimize a toolpaths step-down for curvature. For this next lesson, we want to start by uploading two supplied files, 3D contour versus ramp and complex 3D finishing toolpaths. We're going to get started looking at the 3D contour versus ramp file. First, we want to explore the 3D contour and ramp toolpaths. First, let's take a look at the file and what we have. We have a single adaptive clearing toolpath and if we simulate this and go to the end of the operations, you can see the geometry that we have left behind. Looks like the bottom is finished. However, we have a rough shape that we need to finish. So we're going to get started by first going to 3D and selecting the 3D contour toolpath. We're going to start by selecting a tool. We're going to navigate to our Cloud library and we want to use our eighth inch ball and tool, which is tool number six. In our geometry section, we have a few different options. The default option is going to be silhouette. When we look in here we have a bounding box, and we also have a selection option. Bounding box, we'll use the entire size of the part. Silhouette, we'll use the silhouette of the selected geometry and a selection will allow us to use some sketch or selection to keep the tool within. I'm going to use bounding box and allow it to explore the entire thing, but there's going to be the option to select geometry we want to focus on as well. I'm going to leave the tool containment to centered on boundary, which will keep the tool from extending outside of that area, and we're not going to have any additional offset. There's plenty of geometry with the shape of this part, so we really don't need to worry too much about containing the tool on what we want to cut. When we're talking about using 3D contour, we have a few options we need to explore. First of which is slope. This allows us to dictate the minimum and maximum angles, which in this case, the default is going to be between 0 and 90, which will start from a flat or horizontal face and go all the way to a vertical face. For example, if you wanted to machine flats, you could start from zero degrees and you could go up to let's say 89, if you didn't want to go all the way to a vertical wall. Because this geometry is tapered at 10 degrees, we could go from a 10 degree, all the way up to a 90 degree, and use that as our criteria for focusing on geometry. Right now, we're going to turn this slope option off because we want to explore the avoid touch surfaces. This can be used in two different ways. We can either select geometry that we want the tool to stay away from, now this could be containment type region. For example, if you want it to stay away from bosses or very specific geometry, we can select that and give it a tolerance or clearance value. But we could also use the option to touch surfaces, which will allow us to select the areas that we want to focus on. To get started, we're going to select all of the areas of this geometry, and we're going to work our way all the way around. We're going to rotate this around to the other side and make sure that we grab all of these faces. After we have everything selected, notice we can right-click and we have a few options. We can repeat select, ''Okay or Cancel.'' Then we also have avoid touch surfaces and entry position inside of here. I'm going to navigate back to the home view and continue on with some of my options. From here, we're going to go to our Heights and I'm going to change the bottom height to be Selection and from the top of this face. There's really no reason for the tool to go any farther than that because we've already finished that area using the adaptive tool path that was pre-saved in this file. Instead of our passes section, we have a lot of different options. You'll notice that we can turn on machine shallow areas, we can give it minimum diameter and cutting radius values to help dictate how far it can go into a corner. We also have the option to allow it to cut both ways or just climb unconventional, and we can give it a maximum step-down value. We're going to set the maximum step down to 0.05 for right now. We have flat area detection, some ordering options if you're focusing on multiple areas, we could order by Islands, we could use a thin wall feature. You'll notice that this also has a multi-axis tilting option. This will allow us to change the orientation of the tool relative to our part if we were working on a multi axis machine. We also can dictate suck to leave. We can turn on affiliate options, smoothing option, feed optimization. Again, all these options could be used, but we're not going to turn them on in this example. We're not going to adjust any of the linking parameters either, we're going to leave them all as default and say ''Okay.'' So now, what we're looking at here is going to be our 3D contour operation. Let's like setup one, simulate, navigate past the first operation, and let's play through and see what this is doing. So with the contour operation when you're working in 3D, what happens is this cuts at a consistent z depth. So it will move down to a z depth then it'll work its way around whatever our selected geometry is. The resolution or quality of this final surface is going to be a direct result of the step-down value that we use. I'm going to go ahead and speed this up and take a look at the shape at the end. So you can see here when we are dealing with the more horizontal or closer to horizontal surfaces, that it has a much bigger step. As we get closer to vertical, it's a little bit smoother. Let's modify some of these perimeters before we check out another option. So inside contour, let's make an edit. In the geometry section, everything looks pretty good here. We're going to navigate to the passage section. We're going to reduce the maximum step-down value of 0.01. Then we're also going to use the option two machine shallow areas. What this will allow us to do is change the amount of step-down that we have based on curvature. So because we have a bigger change in curvature in this top section, we want to have a smaller step down there. In order to do this, we have a couple of different values that we can set. There's a minimum shallow step-down and a maximum shallow step-over. We're going to leave those as default and we want to make sure that we have our maximum step-down value, be larger than the minimum shallow step-down. If we want to get a really good example of what this looks like, we can make our maximum step-down value pretty big. In this case, 0.1, so that way we can see how it changes the resolution. Let's select ''Okay,'' and let's take a look at the tool path results. If we navigate to a front or a right view and we take a look at our results, you can see that all the walls are closer to vertical, we're actually getting a much bigger step-down. As the curvature increases, it's getting smaller and smaller. So this allows us to use a larger value for more vertical walls, and then we can have a decreased the step-down for the surrounding geometry. Let's go ahead and once again simulate this. Go into the next operation, and then we're going to play through this a little bit faster. So you can see it has a smaller resolution on top, and as it gets closer to vertical, it's going to start to step down a little bit higher. You'll also notice it's doing a helical entry in all of these areas. As it gets to the bottom, we can see that there is a visible difference in the step-down from this upper section to this lower section. So utilizing some of these options can be very handy especially if you're dealing with complex curvature. The next thing I want to take a look at is the 3D ramp option. We're going to use the same tool, we're going to use the same settings, we're going to use a bounding box for the tool containment. Tool containment will be centered on boundary. Then in the model section, we want to select the surfaces that we want to focus on. So I'm going to work my way around, I'm going to select only the regions that I want to focus on, and again, we'll have to rotate this to make sure that we select all the faces. Once we have them selected, let's navigate back to a home view, then move on to some of our other settings. Again, for the model bottom, we're going to use a selection option. Then in passes. Notice, that we don't have as many options that we do when we're dealing with the 3D contour. We can set the tolerance and some diameter values, we can use the maximum step-down value, and we'll go ahead and reduce this to 0.01. We have flat area detection and order bottom to top using the bottom-up option. But we're going to say ''Okay,'' and leave all these settings. One of the main driving differences that we see when we're talking about using a 3D ramp as opposed to a 3D contour, is the fact that the ramp toolpath ramps down as it goes around our part. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your geometry. Let's go ahead and select adaptive, hold down the Control key and select ''Ramp,'' then go into simulate. This will allow us to take a look at just these two toolpaths. As we play ramp, you can see that it starts out very similar to our contour and it works its way around. We're likely not going to notice a very big difference looking at the final part, but one thing that we can see when we look at it from the side, is the cuts are a little bit different from side to side. There's a little bit more of a cut on the left side than there is on the right. It's a very minor difference based on a really tight step-down value. But what we see with this toolpaths is that it's constantly ramping down as it's cutting our geometry. Again, it's very much based on the geometry that you're cutting. Let's take one quick look at the complex 3D finishing toolpaths, and let's take a look at using a 3D contour in this situation. Again, we are going to carry on using the ball and Mill, we're going to select our bounding box, tool centered on boundary, then we want to go to avoid touch surfaces, use the touch option, and we're going to focus on just a single surface. We're going to say ''Okay,'' and allow it to generate. So here, it's going to allow us to use that contour operation to go back and forth to finish just the single face. We want to make adjustments to the toolpaths. We can come back into the passes, we can use machine shallow area with some tighter resolutions, we can go back to our geometry and select additional faces. For example, these fillets. Then we can allow it to calculate and adjust that step-down value based on curvature. So this is a great example that really shows us how as we get into areas where we have more curvature, it's going to make adjustments so that's step-down and get a much better resolution where it needs it. Ultimately, we're not going to finish using the contour toolpaths on this. So make sure that you save your file. Once you've saved it and we've captured that information in one of the versions, we're going to right-click the contour operation and delete it. As always, I strongly urge you to continue to play around with these toolpaths so you can explore some of the options and see how they affect the overall result. For the 3D contour versus ramp, again, I like to go back to a home view and save my file, and then we can move on to the next step.
