Additive & Subtractive Manufacturing Workshop at RhinoDAY

We were invited to present at the workshop & conference from January 15-17 at RhinoDAY in Savannah, Georgia. I got into Savannah a day before the workshop and it was one of the coldest days of the year (not being used to this cold in Southern California). We were all geared up for the cold weather and our workshop was held at Savannah College of Art & Design’s (SCAD) Jewelry department in the historic district of Savannah, GA.

The main focus of the workshop was to gain hands-on experience in working with both MecSoft’s Additive and Subtractive manufacturing software products running inside Rhino 5.0.

We started the day by teaching Rhino3DPRINT – the “additive manufacturing software” which is latest addition to MecSoft’s suite of software products.

Our attendees were excited to learn this new plug-in product as it fully integrates into Rhino’s interface. As they were all familiar with Rhino it was easy start and they found the Rhino3DPRINT tools very powerful & easy to use. We started out with a point cloud data & worked thro creating, repairing and smoothing out the mesh model. We then exported the model as STL and by the end of our 1^st hour we had our 3D model ready to be printed. Ty Donaldson at SCAD was one of our attendees and helped us out in printing the Rubber duck model on the uPRINT SE printer from Stratasys. The printer’s software automatically added the required supports and estimated the total print time to be little over an hour. Here are some pictures & videos of our first 3D printed part.

We worked through several other models that required mesh repair and fixing. Our attendees were wowed with the ease of use, powerful and automatic tools for the preparation of 3D data.

We then moved on to the Nesting module in RhinoCAM. The tabbed interface in the RhinoCAM’s Nesting browser made workflow very easy to nest the parts to a sheet. They learned how to use True shape and Rectangular nesting by the time we headed out to lunch.

Thanks to the administrative staff at SCAD. They were very helpful and it was nice of them to take us all into their campus dining in their shuttle.

After getting back from lunch our focus shifted to RhinoCAM’s MILL module to learn subtractive manufacturing. Our attendees learnt how to use RhinoCAM to program prismatic parts and complex 3D models using the different machining methods offered in RhinoCAM. They found the cam interface very intuitive and noticed that how well it integrated into Rhino. Making a change to the CAD geometry in Rhino only required the toolpaths to be regenerated in RhinoCAM without having to start over.

During the workshop we also programmed a V-Carving toolpath and machined this on a Handibot CNC from Shopbot tools. This portable CNC machine does an amazing job where you place the Handibot on top of the workpeice to be cut. Within a few minutes we had the engraved letters cut on the machine. Here are some pictures of the machined part. Thanks to Bill Young of Shopbot tools for making this CNC available to us at the workshop.

Watch the Handibot in action…

Overall it was a great experience to be part of the RhinoDAY workshop. I would like to thank Jackie Nasser & Andrés González from McNeel Miami for all their help & support in putting together this event and inviting us.

Check out our events page to see when our next presentation will be.

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Joe Anand

Joe Anand has been President and CEO of MecSoft Corporation since 1997. Previously Joe worked for Siemens UGS PLM Software running a Custom Projects group implementing specialized projects for strategic global partners such as GM, Opel and GE as well as working on 3D machining algorithms for the NX product series. Before that he worked at Intergraph Corporation and was responsible for rewriting Intergraph's 3 Axis milling product. Earlier, Joe held senior positions at Auto-trol Technology and GE Calma.