Knurling and textures

There was a discussion in the MadCAM forum at cnczone.com how to produce textures and as usual it's so much easier to see it visually. Here are my contributions. Knurling The classical line cutting is pretty straight forward, it's just a matter of making the polyline pattern you like and then do it with a Project Curves command. There's a catch though (There will be a check for this in coming releases); you need to cut below the surface to get the lines in the material. You set Stock To Leave to a negative number to do that. But you can't set Stock To Leave to a value lower than the cutter radius! 2 mm cutter, -1 at most. 4 mm cutter, -2 at most and so on. This is only happening on the negative side though. The algorithm behind the path calculation will find edges in the mesh and fall through. BUT there's a simple work around for this. The Project Curves command is only following the polylines with the tool tip and which tool you choose in the cutter dialog doesn't matter for the tool path itself. The only thing that will happen if you choose a bigger cutter is that the simulator will not show the exact result. Select a 4 mm cutter and you can cut to -1.9 with no problem.

Textures When it comes to a 3D surface like a plastic pistol grip, this is how I have done it. There are for sure 10 other ways to do it but this came out very good. * I'm splitting the area of the surface where I want to make the 3D pattern. * Use the ApplyDisplacement command that takes an image and "bumps" the surface. Play with the image itself and the texture settings. I've used an image of gravel. ApplyDisplacement is using the contrast in the image to make the texture within the height you specify in the dialog. A Black and white image with very little shades will make the surface "worse", a softer image will make the surface smoother. * This is not yet a real surface, it's just a visual context. Extract the bumps with MESH->From Nurbs Object, and then apply the mesh on the surface with Mesh->Apply To Surface! * At last, remove the original surface, reselect the working box, make a region and prepare a toolpath.

(And of course, the vid's are available in HD)