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So we're now at the more complicated point of this recording which we're going to split into individual videos. So we're dealing with 5D and 6D contouring at this stage. So the first operation that I'd like us to take a look at is the use of dry faces. So I'm going to add a new operation under 3D 5D advanced we'll go with 6D contouring and if we just zoom back in here we are going to use the dry faces operation on the job assignment here.

and to do so we select our first face and in this case I'm going to use the side tool to propagate that selection out and I'm going to click on dry faces. So as we can see by default it's gone and generated a toolpath here that seems actually pretty close to the curve that we just used in the 4D one. It's not quite the same though because the rules of generation for it are pretty different and I'm just going to very quickly show you those now. So we click on the group here and we go to properties and we have a few options and settings we can play with at this point.

Now the method obviously determines how many of these lines we can use. So we can either define by number or by distance between them and it also calculates how many or it can use scallop which is going to be defined by tool step over which is a little bit irrelevant to our needs right now so we're going to stick with number. and we're going to go with three of them and the curve distribution is the bit that tends to get people the first time they try it. So in this instance if we were to use auto we'd probably see some rather nastily clipped curves up towards the top here so I'm just going to click on ok to demonstrate that.

And yeah we can see we've got curves that are getting snipped a little bit here it doesn't look very good. For a surface that didn't have this intersection going on it would probably be fine but here now we're going to manipulate it so we don't have that problem. So we go back into properties and I want to set the curve distribution to from end and the reason for this is it bases it on what it deems the start middle and end of the surface that it's working with. and in this instance it sees the start as the top and it sees the end as the bottom.

So I'm going to go with from end and that will force the first curve to be on that edge of that surface and it will then space them out accordingly from there. So if I click on ok now we can see how we've got three toolpaths there which are spaced evenly that don't have any of the horrible work trimming going on there. and that are spanned nicely across our surface. Now the next thing that we need to be aware of is how we're actually going to approach cutting them.

So we're going to take a look under strategy now and we obviously want them to be normal to surface. We need to define our rotary axis which defaults to WCSX we want that to be WCSZ. and I think we probably want to take a look at our safe surfaces as well just to be certain. So yeah there we go so our safe surface currently is a plane which doesn't make much sense for a form like this.

Cylinder would be a good option but I'm actually going to go with sphere because given that we are probably going to be moving around this object a fair bit using subsequent operations it makes sense too. I'm going to bring this sphere in a little bit though because it's pretty big so let's just scroll that down minus 10 looks good. We are also going to come back as well and take a look at short links as well for reasons you'll see in a second. And finally we want to set our orientation we'll try generating it now see if it automatically snaps around to a viable Z orientation it should do and it does.

and that's fine we can use this where it's going directly perpendicular along the axis like this. or we can actually use this normal arrow here to give us a better angle more in accordance with the plane of the surface which I think I'm going to do. So we're going to go to tool orientation and we're going to grab that normal arrow and we're going to click OK and then generate and you can see how it's already tilted down a little bit further anyway. So what we can do is we can't specifically configure what that's going to be we can play around with lean lead and side angles a little bit I'm not going to bother.

because that's kind of getting into the weeds a little bit of what we're doing. So in this instance we'll very quickly simulate this and see how it looks. So let's quickly run and we can see how as we discussed in the four axis axial versus normal configuration we've now capitalized on the fact that we've got flat surfaces here. and the full range of axes of our mill so we're actually getting an even cut across all of this toolpath.

Right that was the bit that I was hoping to avoid so we can see here we've got a short link that actually tracks directly across the surface and unfortunately if we were say setting this line to cut one mil deep into the part we'd get a gouge there. which would obviously follow a very nice clean curve but it's not really right for what we want. So if we go back to short links and we define it to go via the safe surface that'll give us generally the best and safest outcome for what we're after. So I'm just going to let this simulation finish because why not it's always nice to see that most of what we've done has worked right and once we've done so we'll have a play around with the short links and.

then go for a very fast resimulation just to make sure it's okay. So there we go right and back in the machining space we go to links and short links on safe surface. and we recalculate and we can see now where those interpolated curves were we've now got a jump straight back out to the safe surface which does exactly what we want. So before I forget I'm going to very quickly rename this operation and I'm going to call this dry faces so we can differentiate between what we're doing with subsequent follow-up videos.

and let's very quickly resimulate as promised just going to speed that up a touch yep and yes that pulls away just as we expected. and that gives us a nice clean set of curves there doing exactly as we've asked. So in the next video we are going to take a look at playing around with curves on surfaces which is another one of the options available in defining 5D curvature operations I shall see you then.