Using older curves that are closed, and then newer curves that aren’t closed?
Sounds like ‘containment geometry curves that are opened, not closed’ – fwiw.
Sometimes these CAM systems have to be deciphered and tweaked regardless of nomenclature.
Things in the GUI like “outside” “inside”, “left” “right”, etc. are just relative.
You got to do whatever it takes to tweak the CAM to spit out the toolpath that’s closest to what you want.
Nothing is automatic. Usually the best results are from situations where you spoon feed the CAM exactly what to do – even if it means machining one surface at a time, per say.
I have a similar approach to that as well. For mastercam I export special seperate files, usually iges format, sometimes .3dm format, and merge into mastercam and put on special layers etc.
A couple other workarounds for containment issues:
If you put a flat surface under the 3d geometry you want to cut, and select it as the part you want to machine RhinoCam will see the 3d surface above it as “interference” and cut only the highest parts to avoid a collision. This is sometimes the fastest way of limiting the machining to a specific region of your model.
Sometimes “helper surfaces” will pull the cutter down where RhinoCam does not generate a toolpath all the way to the bottom or edge. If you post G code with these surfaces turned on you can turn them off and avoid having them interfere with the rest of the machining process. If geometry is not visible when RhinoCam posts G code it will not be recognized as part of the model for that specific operation.
Thanks everyone…As I stated at the start its been a few years since I used RhinoCam and it turns out I was me and not RhinoCam that was messing up. Getting old and rusty I guess. Part surfaces is what I needed to select not Containment regions.
Selecting a surface is still basically containment. RhinoCam is just providing alternative methods of defining the limits of the area to be cut. For “2D” operations this does not always need to be a closed containment in some cases and it is not even limited to 2D in the case of engraving, which will follow a curve in 3D. But 3D operations need a closed containing parameter, even if this is not really the area you want to cut.
Here is a sideways thought - you should check the units in Rhino - if the Absolute Tolerance is set too high then strange problems occur. I’ve wasted countless hours chasing non-existent bugs with a very high tolerance set - once the tolerance was lowered the issues went away.
