[bearwen]

Ok I know this is not the right place but everyone is quick to reply in this forum. Here goes I am wanting to do relief carvings I am currently using Adobe illustrator and photoshop along with meshcam. However meshcam is great but I would like to be able to pick and choose what areas are cut and at what stepover (the problem I have is meshcam covers the whole piece which works but really slows me down when I only want certain areas carved with alarge stepover and others with a small stepover I want to be able to say this part cut at blah and this sectiomn cut at blah so when I rough cut and remove everything cut through then when I run a final it wont go back over that area since there is nothing there) So how do I do this I have autocad 2006, photoshop,adobe illustrator, meshcam, and I have access to Mastercam9 and X but I dont know how to use these programs what programs do you guys recommend to do what I want to do? I will buy it if its not one I have Oh and I will be using Mach2 or3 to run the machine.

Thank You all

[ger21]

Not the most elegant way, but you can "cheat" with MeshCAM by using smaller stock sizes with different offsets do do partial areas.

I'm not sure I've seen any CAM software that will let you assign different stepovers for different areas. At least not as one operation. Some higher end software will let cut the whole part with one tool, then, with a smaller tool, go back over just the areas that need more detail. Expect to pay several thousand dollars for features like this. I believe I saw it in an ArtCAM demo video.

[bearwen]

Ger21,
That is exactlly what I want to do cut it out and then do a finish pass or 2 or 3 over just the areas that I want to clean up. I have seen it done in mastercam on a demo but when I went to try to do it in mastercam 9 and x I couldnt get it to work I just dont know how to use it and well its at a friends work so I get to use it after hours but no one can help me. I used artcam a few times but it would crash all the time I would be mad if I bought it again a friend had it at work it was running on an older 1 ghz computer with only like 256 megs of ram would that cause it to crash? Any other software out there that will do what I want to do I carve such large objects 2 sqft or bigger so this would greatly speed up cutting time.

[ger21]

If you spend over $5K on software, I wouldn't expect it to crash at all.

I don't really know what's available to do what you want, but I do know it will be expensive.

[imserv]

Stlwork permits you to select your cut surface target within a cubic volume by dragging x ,y, and z boundaries. It has a no-flats option that ignores rectangular, flat areas outside the surface contours. It also permits selection of waterline finished surfaces by surface angle ( for irregular patches).

http://www.stlwork.com

Fred Smith - IMService
http://www.cadcamcadcam.com/hobby

[WhiteTiger]

This may be naive, but if you are working from a graphic or a plot file, why not simply edit the original into two files? Run the complete one for roughing, the second with only the detail areas left in and run that one at a finer stepover?


Tiger