Recently Art Metal was approached by a designer to fabricate a railing combining glass and decorative steel pieces. Almost all of the decorative pieces was available off the shelf but one required a custom casting. The designer faxed a quick 2D pencil sketch to show what they were thinking. It included no dimensions and came without a 3D view. Although they could have designed the model in a traditional CAD package it would have taken time to complete and changes would be difficult.

Luckily, Art Metal was able to participate in the MeshCAM Art beta program. The first step was to generate clean artwork from the faxed image. For this task they turned to Xara, http://www.xara.com. The artwork was tweaked several times to make it more symmetrical and to make the stem suitable for welding on to the round bar that supports it.

Although the artwork above was done well, it did require several changes to get the shape right. This included things like the tapered stem so that it would blend better into the body of the flower. It was this iterative process that inspired the history functions in MeshCAM Art. Using this document history the geometry can be rebuilt very quickly if the artwork changes without need to redo all of your work from scratch.

After the designer approved the model based on a screen shot from MeshCAM a wood pattern was milled on Art Metals CNC mill. The toolpaths were a simple task using the CAM functionality built into MeshCAM. The foundry took the wood pattern and cast nearly a hundred pieces. The images below show the completed railing after installation.

Overall the process went smoothly and one part of the job that could have been difficult became one of the easiest.

MeshCAM Art benefited from the feedback that Art Metal provided. Three new commands were developed and several other changes were made to support real-world applications.