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So in this first session we're going to do the basic setup and then we're going to take a look at the 4D contouring operations. So first off I'm just going to get a couple of groups set up so we've got our operations nice and tidy because we are going to be reusing a certain amount of information which can get confusing quite quickly. So that's our 4D contouring group and this will be our 6D contouring group. So starting with 4D contouring we are going to take a look at our part so zoom in a bit.

We are going to use this curve for our 4D contours. So first things first, we had a 4D rotary operation, 4D contouring and we want to define our tool orientation. So let's grab that normal there and we'll just pan around to the front to make sure that we're happy with that. That should be okay and we are going to go to job assignment and we're going to set this curve on the surface.

We're going to define our strategy using the rotary axis which is Z not X which will probably forcibly snap this round to being horizontal instead. We're going to take a look at parameters we're happy with, we'll set the safe surface as a cylinder, that's absolutely fine. Let's generate the toolpath and much as expected we have got the reorientation happening there and it should be a fairly simple rotary toolpath. So if we just let this come in and come down and we can see that there's no motion in this axis here at all, there's only vertical motion and rotary motion here.

That's because this particular operation is set to machine to the rotary axis. We do actually have another option with 4D contouring so I am going to set this name as axial and we're going to take a look at the other option. Now for the sake of simplicity I'm just going to duplicate this and I'm going to rename this as radial. No, I'm not going to rename this as normal, sorry getting very confused here.

As I say I'm running a little bit low on sleep at the moment, yay for being a new dad. The primary difference that we're going to be seeing here in strategy, so at the moment the tool orientation is set to the rotary axis. What we're actually going to do here is we're going to set it to normal to surface and what this will do is it will mean that it will capitalize on making use of any flat sections that we have and it will interpolate its motion accordingly. So if we click on generate toolpath now there will be a slight difference which should make itself fairly clear fairly soon.

So if we run this now and we can see here's the difference. So we're actually using the range of motion available in the other axes to make sure these straight lines are properly utilized and this means that we will actually get a significantly cleaner cut on an otherwise 4D shape. So in this instance were the shape perfectly cylindrical using the surface normals wouldn't make any sense but in any shape that's got any kind of flats in there or anything like that this is much more appropriate. Moving on from this we're going to take a look at 6D contouring shortly.

I have no idea why I've left the word group in there actually. Sorry again slight stickler for detail here. Let's get rid of the word group because that's kind of weird. And I will see you in the next video where we start to dig into dry faces and the other deeper elements of contouring.

Catch you then.