Odd Toolpath Generation Behavior

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Bryce
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Mar 09, 2010 8:18 am

Odd Toolpath Generation Behavior

Post by Bryce »

I occasionally find that VM4SW will output some portions of toolpath as arcs if the selected geometry is a flat area feature. This is the resulting toolpath:

Image

Whereas, if I select curves from the sketch I used to generate the flat area, the toolpath will not have anywhere near as many arcs.

Image

There are a number of splines in this example, but I'm curious as to why they would behave in this manner. The posted file for our machine is literally half the size when I generate it from flat area geometry. It also cuts faster and leaves a cleaner edge than when I cut using the file generated based on curve geometry.

Anyone have any ideas on this? It's the reason I posted yesterday about the mass selection of flat areas. It's also a reason I would love to see associative flat area updating in future releases of VM4SW.

In this example, I've got 200 of these little trees to cut, and they need to be nice. But the slow going of selecting these individually is hindering productivity.
MecSoft Support
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Joined: Wed Aug 01, 2007 4:15 pm
Location: Irvine, CA, USA
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Post by MecSoft Support »

The reason you are getting more arcs when selecting flat areas is because we perform arc fitting after the boundaries are generated. When you use sketches we stay true to the sketches and so if the sketches do not have arcs we will not generate arcs in the output.
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