Martin, that's an interesting approach, to use the toolpaths in MoI. But I can't quite figure out how to trim the resulting surfaces. Any tips on getting the final result?

It's really a matter of splitting up the geometry so that separate fully intersecting surfaces are produced that are good candidates for Trimming with one another... it can and does get quite messy on screen, but is doable.

On the other hand, if all you really want to do is produce V-Carved shapes, then I would strongly suggest you buy CamBam and use the totally free and unrestricted V-Engrave plugin - it works a treat and CamBam is the most bang per buck of CAM software anywhere, anyway.

See here: http://www.cambam.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=3513.0

 

Martin.

Here is a couple visuals of me fooling around with it...

I thought as Blowlamp and just used a Vcarving program to generate some gcode, then I converted the gcode to dxf and brought it into MoI. I could do a simple loft on the outer profiles of the toolpath and get the vcarve surface...



The second one is my "fake" vcarve. It's fake because the proper calculations for a vbit or specific tool, to rise and fall in the shape aren't attainable with my eye.. I just made a shape that looked kindof "vcarvy"... It does show the surface trimming thing that I think Blowlamp is referring to, though... I've attached a 3dm of the second method with the surface and the curves I used....



The file I posted is a little different than the video. The file has just a center morphed curve, rotated by "end" down to a depth. The 2 meet up, and are lofted and trimmed the same as the video...

MorphBetween2curve is a good trick ! ;)
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6373.1

Another file here.

In it, I swept the green curves around the magenta letters to make intersecting surfaces, which were then trimmed to leave those as shown.

The next step was to Copy & Paste the 'ridge' curves to make them into the orange curves placed at the surface intersections.

Finally, copies of the orange curves were mirrored below the surfaces to give the blue curves and it is these that can be used directly as toolpaths for an engraving style of machining operation.

If I'd modelled the surfaces to peak in the opposite Z direction it would have saved having to create and mirror the orange curves to get the blue ones, but I just find it a bit easier to do it this way.

Using a Tapered Extrude that trims at the peaks would be an easy & quick way for us to get the right shape, but this isn't possible due to the complexity of such a task.



Martin.