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Hi there, so we've just finished with the simple 2D contouring. We're now going to move on to the 3D contouring. So we go back to the machining environment and we're going to add an operation. I'm going to go to 3D entry and 3D contouring and we're going to go to job assignment and then we need to select the curve that we're interested in which is this nice castellated looking curve here.

So we'll click on curve to assign the job. Now again we've got this high level illustration here. It doesn't mean the same thing as it did in the 2D curve though so it's not going to traverse that entire height. What that's doing is that's actually illustrating at the top of the model exactly where the 2D projection of that curve is going to be.

So we can go to strategy just to double check that we can see that the top offset and the bottom offset is at zero millimeters. So basically it's going to be following this 3D trajectory exactly. What I would like to do as well is I'd like to double check the tool orientation is set to positive one in Z or up. This is exactly what I want to see because I want that perpendicularity of the tool and I'm now going to click on OK and we're going to generate the toolpath once we've enabled move up E3.

Don't want to get caught out by that again. It should generate a toolpath at this point. We're going to look at the axis map just to see where the hang up is. Click on build map and again we've got that same out of limits issue right directly on the zero degree deflection of the sixth axis.

This is not a problem so I'm just going to enable check collisions and then build map and we can see we're nice and clear again. Going to build the graph, update the toolpath and then just very quickly sanity check it whilst we're here and we can see that's looking pretty good. So the next thing we're going to do, click on update, close out of here then go and simulate our toolpath. So again we've got the same reset node status issue here that we had before.

That's not a problem. We're going to click on run here so we should see it moving through at a fair old clip. Yep and that's come up nice and green. Sometimes when you get the green node status here the root node status doesn't update because it's still got its old status from the previous issue.

Not a big deal we can just reset that node status and leave that as if it's not a problem. In the next video we'll be covering the 6D contouring which is where things start to get a bit more interesting. See you then.