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Hi there, so in this last video in the course we are going to take a look at using manual 5D curves. So we're going to do this to approach a particularly nasty curve as well. So if we zoom in a little bit and we set up our new operation, which again 3D 5D advanced and 6D contouring, I'm going to grab this spiral that's on a sphere. Now anyone that's done any kind of longhand coding for CNC machines will know that without an extremely solid grasp of geometry, that will be horrible to try and describe, especially in five axes.

It's probably multiple math degree territory, and I'm definitely not that smart myself. However, ENCY makes this much more manageable. So we have got this highlighted, we're going to click on 5D curve right now, and we are given this ribbon interface here. Now this ribbon, the ribbon itself describes the orientation of the tool relative to the tool path.

That white handle there on the green ribbon that you can see is your starting control. You can define as many of those along the ribbon as you wish. I would recommend that you use as few as possible just to save yourself a lot of confusion because it can become overwhelming very quickly. And quite often you'll find that many forms can be described using only two or three different handles.

It's much the same as, I don't know if you've got any experience drawing in Bezier curves in programs like Illustrator or something, you typically want to use as few control points as possible. But I digress. So I'm going to grab this starting one here. And we can see here we've got an indication of what the tool holder and tool looks like along with the angles that it's being positioned at.

And these angles are based on the normal to the surface that you're actually working with right now. And in this instance, this is currently set as being perfectly perpendicular to that point on the sphere, which, yeah, I'd say that makes sense. So what we're going to want to do from here on out is we are going to want to set the safe surface again, just to be certain. So let's go sphere and minus 10.

We're going to leave the strategy alone for now. We want it to stick with normal to surface, but beyond that, this should override setting of rotary axes. We've got our tool orientation predefined anyway, it's pretty close to where we need it to be. So I'm going to click on generate.

And we can see right off the bat, we've actually got a pretty clean looking set of tool paths at work there. So if we're going to simulate this now, let's click on run. And it comes in and we should see a rather nice interpolation where, yes, you can see now the bed is tilting accordingly, where it turns in that perfect spiral up until the tool is standing almost vertically from the top of the sphere. So what we can do is we can always adjust that final vector as well to make sure it is perfectly vertical, because I'd like it to be.

So let's take a quick look at doing that. So we go back into the machining environment, and we're going to zoom in, we're going to grab, we're going to go into job assignment first, because that's where you have control of these, because you wouldn't want it in every space, obviously. And we are going to grab that last one. And we are going to snap that round as best we can to zero, and that's going to want to be minus 90, I believe.

So that's good. It's worth noting that these angles are derived relative to each other, so that's what the minus 90 comes in from. So if we generate that now, and then simulate it very quickly, we should get something that looks a little bit more straight up and down. So let's give that a second.

Yeah, not quite right, but not far off. The spiral itself doesn't, I believe, oh no, it does terminate on the very apex of that. Fine. Well, in which case, we have no excuse.

Let's turn off the machine and manipulate it a little bit further, shall we? So I would like to grab this, and does that align? Not quite perfectly, so let's just bounce around a little bit and make sure it's in as perfectly straight a line as we can achieve, because I'm very much stuck in my perfectionist zone at this point. Okay, I think that looks pretty good relative to the top, that's fairly straight, but if we turn the machine back on and we re-simulate now, let's just rotate the view and tidy that up a little bit and then come back in.

So, regenerate, re-simulate, and all told, I'd say that's looking a bit better. There you go, almost perfect. However, what if we wanted it to come the other way around? What would we do then?

So, if we go back into the machining environment, and we've decided that what we'd like to do is we'd like it to start from the top instead of from the side, so we've got the normal curve controls that we typically have, with all of the offset management, start point, end point, and all that, but we can also define the direction, either using this tiny little arrow that comes up in orange here, or we can click on the curve properties and alternate the direction, which is absolutely fine. We also then have the advantage of being able to use one of the ordinal angles to make sure that we've got this perfectly straight, because if we're going to be a stickler for detail, we might as well do it properly. So, let's go to setup, and we're going to set the tool orientation to up, and then OK, and I'm going to set this line in job assignments to 00, and ironically enough, that one actually looks pretty perfect where it is, so I'm going to leave that as it is. Now, one thing that is worth noting is we've only left standard approach and return rules on.

There's no collision avoidance, so we may end up having to set that as well. So, if we generate the tool path at the moment, and yes, we can see right away it's going to try and intersect with the parts, and we don't want that. So, if we go to links, and we set our approach to avoid collisions, and then generate the tool path accordingly, that looks much better. So, let's simulate this now, make sure that we're absolutely happy with what we're seeing.

Just slow this down a little bit, and we're going to click run. Yep, that comes up nice and clean, and we can see now that that's much more conformant to the actual normal of the spherical surface, which is what I wanted all along, really. Sometimes it is easier to just come at things seemingly a little bit backwards to get the best result, and you now have a hopefully fairly solid insight into how the different contouring systems work in 6D contouring. For the sake of argument, I'm going to very quickly rename this one, just because it's the convention we've followed so far.

And that concludes our tutorial for how to handle complex contouring in a CNC machining environment, specifically using a 5-axis CNC mill. I hope this has been useful for you, and I'll catch you in the next video. Take care.