You can in fact do more or less the same thing, just draw your toolpath and use the Engraving op which simply follows the selected curves with the tooltip…
I’m intrigued. Will RhinoCAM now allow the resulting toolpath to represent the center of a ball-nose tool? If so, that might be a workaround. When I was shopping for a CAM product, RhinoCAM couldn’t do that. As you said, it “…simply follows the selected curves with the tooltip…”
In MadCAM, I draw the critical part of my toolpath on a surface that is offset 1/4" from the part surface and use a 1/2" ball-nose tool. MadCAM already respects the ball-nose tool in creating the non-critical parts of the toolpath and I just edit my part of the toolpath into the MadCAM-generated toolpath in place of what MadCAM made there. If I could get an equivalent in RhinoCAM I’d probably move to RhinoCAM, but when I was evaluating the product the representative with whom I was working indicated that my request was an impossibility because the engraving op could only define the toolpath as the tip of the tool (I’m not interested in “fooling” the software by machine setup shenanigans).
Sadly, so do I. I’ve been pestering him to either fix a bug in his 64 bit “cut simulator” or revert to a previous version for two years now. All I get is mumble mumble Microsoft mumble voxels mumble mumble. 
Thanks for the insight.
He spent a long time on that simulator. He’s probably taken it as far as he can. Most CAM products license their simulators from here:
He was pretty determined to make it work, and he did send me some of his results. It wasn’t useable for anything but simple stuff. I’m not sure how it is now, as we moved to RhinoCAM when we updated to Rhino 6.
Dan
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Hello there, 1. Engraving toolpath can be used to convert geometry to toolpath. You can also set it up so that the tool center is output rather than the tooltip as it is typically done in Europe.
2. You can also use reverse post machining to project a G-code file onto a set of surfaces in 3 axis mode
3. You can convert the generated toolpath to Rhino geometry using the toolpath editor (Only available in the Pro mode)
You can call us here at MecSoft 949-654-8163 or email sales@mecsoft.com or support@mecsoft.com to setup an online demo and we can show you the capabilities of RhinoCAM. That would be the best way for you to determine if RhinoCAM can do what you want it to do.
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)RhinoCAM plug-in only works in Rhino 5 64bit & Rhino 6 for Windows
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