A little background. I have always made my parts with an origin of 0,0,0 in the lower left corner In Rhino. So the part is built on top of the construction plane with z=0 at the bottom of the lower left hand corner. When these parts are exported in STL format and then brought in to Vectric the Work Zero is defined in Vectric at the top of the part and it all works well.
In trying to follow your advice for MadCam on moving the Z-zero point in Rhino I moved the elevation of the CPlane to the top of the part, regenerated the surface region and tried to generate a tool path with MadCam and I still get the same positive numbers in the GCode file. If I display the Box-Region dialog it contains X-Top=1.018 and X-Bottom = 0.2499 which is my part region. Am I not defining the Z-Zero properly? I don't know how else to do it but I am always learning about Rhino.
My impression with Madcam is the Box Region defines the Work Zero surface using Z-Top and Z-Bottom. I feel I must be wrong about this though. If I set X-Top to 0 and X-Bottom to either 1 or -1 MadCam fails to generate a path.
I have attached pictures of my work piece with the tool path and the box-region. Z-Top is 1.0018 and the Z-Bottom is 0.2499. The first picture is with the CPlane at the top of the part. It is difficult to discern. The second picture is with the CPlane moved to the bottom of the part and the corresponding GCode generated from MadCam. There is no difference. You can see that the Box Region still contains the same values for both Z-Top and Z-Bottom so they are always relative to the CPlane not absolute.
As an aside and others have reported this, the settings for the tool table never maintain themselves. I use inches and selected that in the settings dialog but every time I click on the tool button on the toolbar it is showing millimeters. I don't think this is connected to my immediate problem but thought it might be worth mentioning.
I am really stuck here and know that MadCam should do these parts fairly easily and it may be something simple I am missing but I am at a loss. I do appreciate all the help so far. Also if there is a better way to include images let me know. I can use drop box but am concerned about potential attacks via the link.
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