More Roughing Progress

I can say that the new roughing really is almost done now.  I managed to fix the bug I posted last time and in doing so I was able to delete about a hundred lines of code and make it more reliable- my favorite kind of bug fix. 

The conformal roughing option is in the dialog and working now and the mill direction setting is working.  The progress bars are very fluid and interruptible which is always a challenge.  I have not assigned the various level of a roughing toolpath to different CPU cores yet so I can have everyone test it before I add that level of complexity.  It shouldn’t be a big change after getting feedback.

 

At Randy’s request the “Machine Geometry + ____” option will now accept any (positive) value with a warning to the user. 

 

The only characteristic that I don’t like is when the conformal option is combined with very vertical surface.  The nature of a nearly-vertical surface is that a small change toward or away from it can cause very large changes in the height.  When the pocket boundaries are projected down onto the model they can look very ragged, especially for very course models (example below).  I need more time to think about this before I can say the “correct” way to solve it is.  I will not hold up the release for this since it can be avoided by if it’s a big problem on a given model.

 

 

Here is my open issue- what to call the conformal roughing option?  Conformal is fine for me but I’m going to try to lower the learning curve for new users in V3 and this is not a really intuitive term.  Unfortunately, I can’t think of a better one.  I’ve thought about calling the option something like “Lock Z Axis” or “Use flat layers” but these are pretty clumsy.  Any thoughts?

 

I’m going to dedicate a few more days to testing.  If everything is OK then expect a release early next week.

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