Sign in to watch this lesson

Hi there, so in this video now we're going to cover the next of the 6D contouring operations. So I'm going to add a new operation, again 3D, 5D advanced. and 6D contouring. And while we can still see that it's maintained the tool orientation to the part, it would have lost every other definition as evidenced by having the safe surface be a plane again.

So whilst we're here we might as well redefine this back to where we wanted it to be. But I'm going to leave everything else for the moment. What I am going to do though is I'm going to go to job assignments and I'm going to grab an edge curve on surface which in this case is going to be this particular edge here. However, this is currently defined as a curve that's independent of the part and this is something that may well catch you out so I've deliberately left this in.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to deselect this for now and I'm going to turn off select curves and instead what we're going to do is we're going to select the rest of that tangent edge there instead because we want it to be a surface edge more than we want it to be a curve on the surface because right now what we're interested in is that particular edge between the two meeting faces. So we're going to click on edge curve on surface now and we can see how it has generated this nice clean ribbon right now, this dashed line looking ribbon here. That tells us that we have got a functional and operable toolpath straight off the bat. Now for the sake of comparison I will show you what happens when you grab a curve in this instance instead.

Bearing in mind that this is not the uniform experience, it's just this is an edge case model which I deliberately chose to highlight how this can go wrong sometimes. So I'm going to hide this, not going to delete it and I'm going to select curves again and I'm going to grab this curve and then click on edge curve on surface and we can automatically see how we've got some dull green weird looking toolpath instead which is impossible to troubleshoot your way through. I know I've tried even though this is actually defined off the intersection points of these faces and geometrically speaking it's identical, sometimes having a curve like that does just confuse ENCY. It's generally very good if you are applying a curve to an object but if you're using a curve as the intersecting edge of this and we're going to go back to using the actual edge.

We're going to have a quick look in strategy. We want this to be normal to surface. We might need to use rotary axis Z, we might not. Let's just double check this first because a lot of the 6D contouring operations actually can override that.

So let's take a quick look. Let's try generating the toolpath and we'll very quickly simulate it. Let's slow this down, let's run this and yep okay give that a second to actually engage and yes so we can see that basically what this has gone and done is because it understands it's normal to the surface and it's reading one of the surfaces that the edge is attached to it automatically determines what the rotational plane needs to be. Quite often, well especially with 4D operations you will need to define the rotary axis and it's worth noting that you may have to with some of these operations anyway.

In this particular instance it wasn't necessary but do not forget that the rotary axis setting is still there and it is still a wise thing to be aware of. In this particular instance though we have managed to achieve a 5D curve on a surface without any particular issue whatsoever so I'm going to very quickly rename this as I've got to do that in the machining environment first. I'm going to rename this as surface curve and in the next video we're going to be taking a look at something much more complicated and hopefully you'll find it as fun as I do so I shall see you there in a second.