In this lesson we'll be rest machining with a 3D adaptive toolpath. After completing this lesson, you'll be able to create a 3D adaptive rest toolpath, and modify a toolpath height to restrict cutting area. To get started, we want to upload the supplied file, Complex 3D Adaptive Rest Machining, and once we have it open, we want to first start by analyzing what toolpaths we have. In this file, we have one single operation, Adaptive1, to get an idea what this does, let's go ahead and simulate it. I'm simply going to use the go-to next operation, which will allow me to see all the stock that's been removed, and this is going to be relative to the original body. Make sure that we're showing the stock and I like to turn off the Toolpath Display simply because I don't need to see where the tool's been in this case, I really just want to see what the stock looks like. So at this point, there's some geometry that hasn't been cut yet, this is a very first roughing operation and if we change the Stock Display to be transparent, you can see that we have two counter boards here, we have a pocket in the bottom, as well as some pockets in the face here. So this means that there's a lot more work to do in terms of some roughing operations, before we ever get into finishing anything here. So what I'd like to do is, I like to create a new adaptive operation, that uses the rest machining and utilizes some different tools. So to get started, the first step in this process because everything's already been selected, is for me to right-click and to duplicate this operation. Then I want to go to the next operation, Adaptive1, and I'm going to rename it to get started and I'm going to call this Adaptive1 Rest. So this way I know that this is a rest toolpath, that's utilizing Adaptive1. I'm going to right-click and edit its parameters, starting with the tool. We're going to start by going down to a quarter inch flat end mill and saying "OK", then navigate to our Geometry section and we want to use Rest Machining. Notice a difference in this Rest Machining, in terms of its options, relative to some of the 2D operations that we've already taken a look at. Rest Machining in 3D is a little bit more complicated, so we have some options for the Source, From Previous Operation, From File, From Bodies and From setups Stock. I'm going use the From Previous Operations option and then we have some options for adjustment, Use as computed, Ignore cusps, or Machine cusps. The cusps are going to be the areas between the transitions of curvature. So in our case, we have a couple different flat areas on our part and we have the transition of these fillets going up to them. In most places, you'll notice like in here, we've got a fillet that transitions between this horizontal or flat face, to a vertical face or nearly vertical face, where it transitions between fillets. We also have this area, which we have a sharp contour on. You'll also notice that when we select this edge, that while it is flat here, it is actually rolling down around this fillet and coming down into this pocket, and if we simply grab this edge here, you can see that it is identifying it as a 2D flat or a flat face here. But keep in mind that there are some differences between the geometry that we will have to handle in finishing, but right now when we're talking about rest machining, we're going to make sure that we leave that machine cusps on and then there's an Adjustment Offset. The Adjustment Offset is set to 0.02 and this is going to be based or relative to the stock that we left behind on the first operation. So I'm going to leave all of these settings as they are right now, and I'm going to leave Stock Contours on for now, but we'll likely come back and we'll make some adjustments to these settings. Under Passes, I'm going to leave Stock just like I did before in the previous operation, because we're not trying to finish anything at this point, we just want to go back in and we want to remove more material that was left behind. So we're going to leave all of the same settings, we're not going to touch anything else, we're going to say "OK", and we're going to allow this to calculate and see exactly where this tool is going to be able to get to. One of the benefits of using the rest machining options, is that it's not going to go back and cut all the geometry that we've already removed, it's simply going to look at what's left behind and then it's going to address that. So now that we have this rest operation, I'm going to select "Setup1" and I'm going to simulate it. I always like to simply go to the next operations since I've already explored that first adaptive toolpath, and then for any new operations, I like to play through them and if I need to, I can speed up or slow down, or I can manually use the cursor in the bottom, to simply navigate to a position and time. So I'm going to allow this to play and notice that it was going back to the top and trying to go ahead and take care of those faces. So it was trying to remove material that was already left behind on the top, even if it is just a small amount. We can likely omit some of that, and then notice it wasn't able to drop down in this bores, which is completely fine, because we want to go back and we want to approach them individually. Then it wasn't able to get much of this material out of these pockets but again, it's the size of the tool that's the limiting factor here. If we change the transparency, you can see exactly what material has been left behind. If we zoom in, we can see the underlying shape and we can see the stair steps that have been cut away by using these different size tools. This is the same thing in these pockets here, you can see that material has been left behind, based on the diameter of the tool. So everything looks pretty good here, but let's go ahead and take this Adaptive Rest and let's duplicate it. Then, now we have an Adaptive1 Rest with a two after it, we're simply going to leave that name and edit this tool. We're going to come in and we're going to navigate back to our CAD CAM Library, and this time we're going to drop down to a three sixteenths flat. Under Geometry, again we have Stock Contours left on, we have Rest Machining from previous operations, material left behind still 0.02, and we're going to say "OK" and allow that to calculate. Now, we should see the smaller tool is able to get into certain areas like the smaller pockets on the face and it's still going to go back and remove some more material, and you'll notice that now it's dropping into those bores. So it is able to get into some of these areas, where the half-inch and the quarter-inch tool just couldn't get. So now that we have this operation, and here again I'm going to select "Setup1", I'm going to simulate it and I'm going to go to next. After each, I'm going to turn off Transparency on my stock, then I'm going to play through the smaller end mill. So now you can see it's taking really small cuts and at a certain point, we're really going to be wasting a lot of time because we're not removing a lot of material. This is one of those instance where really the main thing that's happening, is it's removing material from these bosses, which means that I really don't need this operation. So what I want to do is modify it one more time, I'm going to go to my "Heights" and instead of Model Bottom, I'm going to use a selection and I'm going to keep it from dropping down below this face. This means it's not going to drop down into this pocket, it's not going to drop down to this area here, and it's not going to drop down into these bosses, I really wanted it to focus on stuff above that. Then I'm going to go back to my tool and rather than using this three sixteenths flat, I'm going to use Tool 6, an eighth inch ball end mill and then on my Passes section on the Stock to Leave, I'm actually going to reduce this to 0.01 and then say "OK". Now, we're still using the same adaptive rest operation, it's going back with a ball end mill, which is able to get a little bit closer to the actual shape that we want. We're still leaving material, but notice that it does a few things here. While it's not dropping into the areas where we don't want it to, it's not going into those bosses, it's not going down to this face, it is wrapping around the parts, trying to cut the outside contour and that's really just a waste of time for us. In order to fix that, we need to go into Geometry and we're going to turn off Stock Contours and then we're going to say "OK". We're going to allow this to recalculate and without that Stock Contours, we should be able to keep the tool in a little bit tighter in terms of the overall shape. We're going to turn off Stock Contours, but for Machining Boundary, we want to use the Silhouette option and we're going to keep the tool centered on the boundary. So what this is going to do, is it's going to keep the tool from going outside on the contour and it will keep it inside focusing on the geometry. If we allow the tool to go outside, it's still would try to cut that outside contour but again, we really don't need to cut that outside shape. We're not really focusing on that in terms of geometry, we want to focus on just the areas that are critical. You'll also notice that it's taking this ball end mill and it's cutting a lot of geometry on these faces. So if we want to keep it from going down into them and we really want to focus on these pockets, we can go back into this operation, back into Geometry and we can go into the Model section and we can select specific surfaces that we want or we can go back into our Heights and we can simply adjust the height. We're going to go to a front view or right view and we're going to take a look at this height right here, and if we adjust this a positive amount, say 0.1, you'll notice that it comes up and we want to simply just keep it above that bottom face. So 0.01 is going to be enough, and if we rotate this around, this will allow it to come down to these fillets but not all the way down to that face, and we can say "OK" and allow it to recalculate one more time, and this will allow it to focus on those three pockets on the side, rather than dropping into any geometry and wasting a bunch of time cutting faces that at this point have been cut twice already. So you'll notice that it is catching a little bit of this geometry still, from a front view, you can see that we do have a lot of operations cutting down here. So again, we're going to go back in and we're going to go back to our Heights, and we're going to add a little bit more. In this case, we'll do 0.05, let it recalculate one last time. So now you can see that we're avoiding this face, and the reason the machining operation we're still trying to go down to that face is because the offset we use of 0.01, was less than the remaining stock amount that we told it it had at 0.02. So even though it was above there, it still thought there was something to machine, so it was trying to get down to that level. But now let's select Setup1, let's go back and simulate everything. We'll skip to the next operation for our half-inch end mill, we'll skip to the next pass a quarter and then we'll play through this last operation with the ball end mill. So now it's going back and forth and it's clearing out some of these areas, getting a little bit closer to that final shape, which will allow us to come back in and do some finishing operations. There are plenty of other things that we can do in terms of efficiency to clear this stuff out, but the general process that we want to look at is how we can utilize adaptive toolpaths. How we can utilize them for rest machining, and really what makes sense in terms of material removal, when we're talking about stepping down to smaller end mills to get in certain areas, and whether or not we want to focus on just a specific area, whether it's a selected surface or controlling it by height, and how we can utilize those rest operations for focusing on these areas without wasting a bunch of time re-cutting geometry or dropping into areas that we don't need. At this point, make sure that you save your file, so we could move on to the next step.
