In this lesson, we'll be creating a scallop toolpath. After completing this lesson, you'll be able to create a scallop toolpath and modify parameters for toolpath resolution. Let's carry on with the file from our previous example, and now let's explore the next toolpath we want to look at; the scallop toolpath. From our 3D drop down, we have the option to create a scallop. The scallop toolpath is going to be great, and allow us to finish in certain areas, and focus specifically on certain areas that maybe other tools wouldn't get, or we just weren't able at this point get to yet. So the first thing that we're going to do is pick an appropriate tool. In this case, I'm going select the 8-inch ball ML, because I want it to get into this small pocket right here. For my geometry section, again I'd just like to use bounding box unless I specifically need to focus on a certain area. We can use things like a silhouette boundary or selection if we want to focus the tool in a certain area, but we're going to use a void touch surfaces to focus the tool on a certain area. I'm going to start by selecting all the faces that belong to this pocket, and we're going to start by just looking at this individual pocket. Once we're happy with the tool path and the parameters, we can come back and select more faces. I'm not going to touch any other settings, I'm simply going say, Okay, and take a look at the result. So you can see that the tool does go in and clear this area out. So now I'm going to select setup one, and I'm going to simulate it. I'm going to skip through all the previous operations until I get all the way down to scallop one, and then I'm going to play through scallop one, and just take a look at the approach it has. So you can see it's working its way from the outside in, and you can see that the resolution isn't fine enough but it is able to get in and clear out that pocket, and this is exactly what we're looking for. So we're going go back into scallop 1, we're going to select Edit, and we're going to go to our passes section. In the passes section right now, the step over is 0625. We're going to reduce that to 0125, then we're going to say, okay, allow it to recalculate, and this will give us a finer resolution in this area. So now again, I'm going to select setup 1, navigate to that, and if we want to, we can actually go all the way to the end and simply see all of the tool paths created, and then we can focus on this area, and take a look at the final result. Now, you'll notice that this point, that it is able to get into and clear out all the geometry. Obviously, these side faces where it can engage to the side of the tool are nice and smooth. We do see a little bit of scalloping inside of the pocket, and in order to fix that or change that, we need to think about two things: we need to think about the size of the tool that we're working with, and we also need to think specifically about the step over, or the direction of cut. Now with the scallop toolpath, what it's doing is it's actually working around this geometry, and it's not going back and forth in a horizontal manner like when we explore the contour operation. So this is going to be a good option for us, and if we need a finer resolution on the surface finish, we can increase that or decrease that by using the step over amount. But now that we've created this scallop toolpath, I'm going to edit, I'm going to go back into my geometry section, and I'm going to select more faces. With this larger pocket, we want to make sure that we do zoom in and then grab that small face there and don't omit it because it will jump over that if we forget to select it. We're going to select all of these other areas, and again we're going to zoom in, make sure that we grab that, and then we'll work our way around to this pocket as well. One thing that we can also do is we can include the faces in-between these pockets, if we want a continuous tool path. So right now, we're going to focus just on those pockets, will say okay, and allow it to create it. Make sure that it is jumping between them just fine. You can see that it is. Then again, we can modify this by going to Edit, Geometry, and selecting additional faces. Once we say okay, now it's going to create this without the additional jumps between the three pockets, but it's going to include all the additional faces. Remember that we are using tool number 6, which is an 8- inch ball ML, doesn't necessarily mean that this is the best tool or the best option here, but it is a small tool that's needed to get into these pockets. So this does mean that we could focus just on the small pockets, come back with a larger tool and focus on the broader areas if we could. So if we want to, we can right-click and duplicate this and for the duplicated, we can go in and edit, we can change the tool. In this case, we'll use a quarter-inch ball ML. We can change the selected faces, and if we want to, we can clear all those and go back and manually select certain areas. For example, focusing in on just this large pocket, and again making sure that we do select those small faces. If you happen to notice the entire part turn blue, if you make your selection directly over an edge, it'll grab the entire part. You want to make sure your cursor is over a face. I want to grab the rest of these faces around, but I'm not going to focus on the smaller pockets, and then I'm going to say Okay. Then I want to go back and I want to edit scallop 1, go in my geometry section, and this time instead of clearing all of my selection, I'm going to manually deselect these areas, then I'll manually deselect all the ones inside of this pocket. Again, making sure that we do go back and remove this small slivers, because we don't want to leave those in and have the tool try to come over and cut them. So now that we're focusing just on the small pockets, because everything is calculated, it's focusing on those areas, and I'm going to reorder these so that I'm using the larger tool first. Make sure that we drag it up. Now, we have the larger tool first, that's omitting those pockets and then we have the smaller tool coming back and clearing out these areas. I'm going to select this and simulated again, I'm going to jump past all of the operations down to duplicated scallop operation, and I'm going to play through this one. So now, we have the large tool that's working its way around, and you'll notice that it's going up and down the wall. This is going to help us produce a nice finished because it's dragging up the wall rather than going side to side. Once it finishes this phase, it's going to work its way around and again it's working its way around that geometry, and you can see everything's being cleared nicely. Let's go ahead and speed this up. Notice that the way that it's approaching this it's working from the outside in and then it comes back and uses that smaller tool to clear out those smaller pockets. If we zoom in, you can see that we've cleared all the geometry out, and again the resolution we're seeing on the screen doesn't necessarily mean that this is what we're going to see on the final part, but it is an indication as to where the tool was cutting, and if we may or may not need to make adjustments to our step overs. If we take a look at the green area that we used our pencil milling operation on, you can see that this is a little bit smoother result because the tool is exactly matching the geometry and working its way inside of here. You can also see that we still need to finish off the filters around this part as well as coming down into this pocket. So there's a little bit more work that we need to do. We can decide how we want to do that by either modifying previous operations such as the scallop, and adding more faces to my selection. For example, if I want to come down in and clear that geometry at the same time, I can do that and I can allow it to come in and clear everything out. So now, let's go ahead and navigate back to our home view. Let's save the file since we've added a few operations, and let's talk about what we've done so far. We're not completely done with this part yet. Obviously, it started out with some adaptive clearing, and some facing operations, and clearing out those two boards for the two small pockets. But we've come back and we've added the pencil toolpaths which allowed us to get a little bit finer resolution and clear out the fillets, then we looked at using scallop. At this point, we still have to come back and we need to clear more geometry. We jump all the way to the end of this toolpath. We still need to focus our attention on this external or this fillets edge on the upper portion of this pocket and the transition between it and the flat face. To do this, we could use one of many different types of toolpaths we've already explored. We could come back in and use, for example, a contour or a ramp toolpath. In this case, since we're already exploring scallop, I'm going to go ahead and use the scallop toolpath. I'm going to keep on using that 8-inch ball ML. From my geometry again, I want to use the avoid touch option, and I'm going to select this fillet. I'm actually going to carry it into the part a little bit further, and I'm going to carry it into this fillet as well. This is also a good time for us to go down and clear out the entire thing at once if we need to. So one thing that we do want to be careful with and make sure that we completely understand is when we're using avoid touched surfaces, this is going to be the only surface or edge that the tool touches. So if we need to carry on to the face, or if we need to go down into this pocket, then we're going to have to do some creative selecting of geometry and boundaries. Right now, we're going to focus on a bounding box for the entire part, and we're going to focus on these phases and simply say okay, and allow it to create this operation. You can see that it's working it's way back and forth along here, and the step over that was used by default is going to be too large. We want to make sure that it's appropriate for the tool that we're using, we can determine whether or not it's cutting up or down, we can manipulate all these settings that we've already looked at and then now, we can go into setup, simulate and I'm going to jump all the way to the end and just take a look at the finishing result. So now that everything's done, we can zoom in and we can explore our results. Again, if we want this tool path to carry on to this flat face a little bit, we really need to go back and either create a sketch and use it as a bounding box, or use some other option. The last thing that we need to be done to this file is to really go back and think about the order of operations. We've explored some of our toolpaths, we've added pencil on scallop at the end, and we've also jumped around with different tools. You can see that we've used 10, 8, 7 and 6, then we used 2-1-2 back to 1 again, then back to 6 again. So we need to think about these operations and whether or not these tools can be reordered and figure out if that actually works. We'll talk about that in the next lesson, but for right now, go ahead and save your file before moving on.
