So I've been using Cut3d for a few weeks now and have a couple of perceptions that could probably be considered "complaints" or "opportunities for improvement" :-)..
So first, the good parts:.. The program is fast and smooth in its operation and has yet to run up against something it can't handle programatically.
And for the opportunities:
"wasted effort": in the Rough Cut output, The code seems to spend an inordinate amount of time smoothing the edges of the material that is being thrown away ?? eg: cutting a doughnut with profile... it carefully smoothes out the doughnut hole.. about 16 passes round and round so I have a perfectly shaped piece of metal to throw away :-).. Doesn't the program know what is waste and what is the part?
With parts having a lot of detail, I find it incredibly inefficient.. eg: I was doing a 1" diameter, 1/8" wide ring with 16 evenly spaced holes with chamfered bottoms and a through hole of 1/6" inch at the bottom of each. To get < 0.001" accuracy on the holes, this seems to require about 1000 passes across the piece in the finishing mode. With my little mill this is about half a day effort.. It would seem to me that it would be far more efficient to have a 3D finishing algorithm that did curve following rather than raster traversal..
Cutout: So since I've already cut down to the top of the part in the material, why does the Coutout pattern start at the top of the material?? it seems to spend half it's time carving out "air"..
I should note that I am a newbie and my mill is a little MaxNC driven by Mach3
--marcel