How I use Blendercam to generate 3d relief carves

using blender cam to set up some really good 3d carves for my cnc machine i start off well we'll start off here with the the default file go ahead and delete the objects here and whenever i'm doing uh cnc operations i like to set up blender for my uh for smaller metric objects so i'll go ahead and start by doing that i'm going to go down here to scene properties and units it's in metric i'm going to go ahead and change this meters to millimeters now i'm going to go up to the top right to overlays and the scale for the grid i'm going to go ahead and swap that to point zero zero zero one that's a one millimeter per grid line that's going to make whenever you zoom in you see the the mesh will start to kind of clip that view so i will go over here um you can press n to bring out this menu you'll go to view and clip start let's see let's zoom in some clip start let's try one millimeter see there we go now we're set up for smaller objects and that should do it for the the initial uh interface setup so we're ready to go ahead and import our model i'll go to file import and stl and i'm going to select this file right here you can't see it on the recording but my my little file picker interface is pulled up here we go and i found this one on yay no not yet i'm sorry uh my mini factory it's by an artist named paul palmer is the duke himself john wayne uh you can find these stos anywhere just a finger versus a popular one you have yagi.com another great one so okay uh stl file is important in the blender really just way bigger than um you would think they should be i'm not sure why this one's uh 74 000 millimeters across we're gonna go ahead and just hit s and scale this down so i'm getting closer to the size we're looking for here which is uh oh man let's see probably about a hundred millimeters across keep bringing it down a little further yeah about right about right there for now is good and i know that my uh my material is about 130 millimeters by 200 millimeters in dimension so that's good for now so next we'll go ahead and go into our render render properties we're going to swap that render engine to cam we won't be making a cam chain today but under cam operators this is where we'll be uh adding our operations i'm going to control click on that just to minimize everything else i'm going to go ahead and set up my machine first so under machine uh let's see my post processor is a grbl and i know my work area is 268 millimeters uh something's wrong here okay whenever you enable blender cam for whatever reason uh and you start messing with the machine i've noticed that you'll actually lose your uh your unit definition over here see look it went back to uh meters under scene properties uh looks like after you swap it back to millimeters one time it uh it stays after that i'm not sure what that's about but it's not a big inconvenience so now back to the uh back to the cam menu 268 millimeters and my y-axis is 318 millimeters and what the heck what 318 millimeters there we go all right hit enter instead of tab that time and i know that my z-axis is 32 millimeters i don't have a lot of z height you'll see it kind of interferes later i have to make a few changes go further down uh no fourth or fifth axis my spindle speed i pretty much operate at 10 000 all the time i'm using the same smart gym mitsu pro bear prover approver whatever i don't know and uh the default is 10 000 that's the max you can run it anyway all right so that's done okay now we go ahead and start setting up our operation let's see if you look though right here you should be able to see the machine there it is all right so there's my machine dimensions right there okay going up to the top here under cam operations i'm going to go ahead and add the first operation i like to make sure that collection is uh selected right here blender cam has had some funny behaviors when it comes to collections so i wouldn't go adding my own collections and make sure that you have that main one selected whenever you do a lot of things anyway you'll you might see what i mean later so operations i'm going to add an operation all right operation one the name i'm going to call this one profile because we'll be profiling it out uh cutting it out okay uh source of data will be an object and the object will be this john wayne bust i've never really used simplified g-code all right going down further check out cam info and warnings nothing yet no warnings nothing's going on just yet can material size and position here we go so um i don't estimate for model i just never have i've had better luck putting in the material size manually so under material size um my material material is 130 millimeters by 200 millimeters on y-axis and it is 19.5 millimeters thick go to uh position object and i'll click it and all this is going to do is just place it on the material and i believe it sets the origin of the object to the very tip right here let's find out uh yeah location z zero okay it just places the very top of the object on the uh the top of your material z zero so that's all it's really doing there and then i can grab it let's look here and i can position it on the x on y axis just kind of in the middle of my uh material let's see grab not on the z-axis over here about right there looks good i don't need it to be right in the middle because i will be cutting it out we have the material size and position set up everything looks good i guess it's a good time before we do the operation setup to discuss what i'm actually going to be doing i'm going to have a a profiling operation that's going to just basically cut this uh cut this out just you know around the entire silhouette here so i won't be you i will be keeping any of this outside material it'll just be cutting that out i will leave these little bridges little little tabs uh as it's calling some software to keep the uh model from breaking free from the rest of the material just a little bitty uh little little sections that aren't cut out that i'll have to manually cut out once that once the cnc machines done this work and i'll have a roughing operation i'll go over with a large bit and cut out a majority of the uh the material but it won't be a very detailed um operation and then i'll swap it out my bit for you for for a smaller bit a 0.5 millimeter ball comb bit and it'll come back and it'll do one final finishing pass across everything and add all the detail so it's going to be three operations um i guess this will be a good time to go ahead and scale our model on the z-axis so obviously you know this is way too thick a material is only and a 19.5 millimeters thick if we were to do it like this we would pretty much have the brim of a hat and a nose and um a lot of the things on the back they're not going to carve anyway because your machine's coming in from the top it's just a three axis machine it's not going to carve a lot of things you know back of his head things like this won't show up anyway let's go ahead and look at it from the side here there's the top of my material there's the bottom of my material we're going to scale it on the z-axis bring them up yeah we're going to flatten them out a good bit i like to get a good bit of that ear looks like okay and none of this down here uh will be carved obviously from here on up will oh i'm wrong so this let me let me click on it that is my material right here i still need to scale this further on the z-axis so we have to flatten them a good bit yeah it brings ear just up above that material okay yeah this is the machine here here's the material all right so that's what it's going to be looking like look like i said we're doing a profiling operation it's going to be cutting it out so under uh cam operation setup we have three axes axes excesses yeah under strategy this will be a profile a cut out i'm going to do something different here though to to uh to generate these profiles these cutouts blender cam uses something called shapely and if you take a look here let's uh tab into edit mode right quick a lot of these imported uh stls and sculptures from thingiverse and wherever you may get it they're very they have a lot of a lot of geometry there's a lot going on there a lot of vertices a lot of faces and edges let's see if i can find uh that's not it here we go statistics just to show you this one has uh nearly what 1.1 million edges 363 000 vertices it's um and and shapely this uh shapely has a lot of trouble generating a silhouette for these types of operations out of models that are that you know that was the word looking for uh intricate what i'll do while we're in edit mode no we have to tap out of edit mode i'm going to go ahead and select my object i'm going to hit shift d to duplicate it i'll hit enter to place it right where it is we're going to hide the original for a minute and we'll go to this copy i'm going to rename it just to keep from being confused here john wayne bust decimated i'm going to go ahead and decimate this object and that means i'm going to tap into edit mode i'll go over here to mesh go down to clean up and decimate geometry and what this is going to do it's going to try to uh it's going to reduce the amount of geometry in this model while trying to keep the same shape and i've had good luck with about 25 so change the ratio from 1 to 0.25 hit enter on it and it doesn't take very long it should calculate and we'll go from 1.1 million vertices you saw that to 272 000 vertices that's that's a lot better all right let's tab out of edit mode and it actually doesn't look that much different um you may be able to do the entire operation off of a decimated version i've never tried i'm not going to try now but maybe sometime all right with this object selected the decimated um duplicate i'll go over here to the side view okay you have to be in object mode for this to come up and it'll be minimized i just kind of stretch it out with the object selected i'm going to go ahead and click object silhouette and it's just going to take a few seconds and it's going to generate a silhouette and your computer may be able to handle just making a uh a silhouette from the original mine it takes i've had it take like an hour before i've had a crash before so that's why i go ahead and i i decimate a duplicate to create my silhouette all right not bad it took about 45 seconds i no longer need this decimated copy so i can select it x and delete it and now i have this silhouette right here and i'll show you what the silhouette is going to be for but i am going to generate one more silhouette for later and you'll see why so with this silhouette selected i'm going to create a silhouette offset and that means to create another one but offset from the original and three millimeters looks about fine to me so there we go there's our original well silhouette there's our offset i'm going to go ahead and rename this one just silhouette offset three millimeters and go ahead and hide it for now so we'll bring back the original dukebust there he is okay we have our silhouette now let's go up to cam operations we're going to change this the object that it's uh based on will be the silhouette itself and not the model okay cam operations set up so the strategy will be profiled the cut will be along the outside not the inside of that silhouette if we continue down i don't really use any of that we will be using bridges let's go ahead and auto auto generate bridges so i'll select that well that was quick okay so bridges are going to be um little little little pieces of the uh of the carve that blender cam is going to ignore and it's just going to leave material there and that's just to go ahead and kind of hold the uh you know hold the carve in place not let it break free while it's being cut let's go ahead and hide this again for a second and this is where we created the uh the bridges i'll go ahead and select use bridges with the bridges i like to play it pretty safe i'm going to go like four millimeters wide height of bridges let's say 1.8 millimeters that you may be able to change it up a little bit to to your needs there we go and let's just take one more look so we have a bridge here there there and there is that going to be enough i think so kind of two on each side all right like i said i go back i select collection don't select bridges or whenever you generate a a path it may end up in that bridges group so going down here use bridges all right cam optimization this is just a profile it doesn't even show you the option to uh use open cam lib everything else looks fine i don't really mess with any of that cam operation area okay so we are going to check use layers here because um you know it's going to have to cut into the material pretty deep using layers i like to use around half of my bit width and i know that my bit width is 3.175 millimeters we're going to divide that by two and there's my step down depth from object all right so moving down to cam movement i'm going to leave all of this alone and can feed rate okay your mileage may vary on my machine i know i can do about 850 millimeters per minute not 8500 there we go my spindle rpm as i said earlier is 10 000. all right cam cutter we will be using an end mill the cutter diameter is 3.175 millimeters it's pretty much all i need to do right there g g-code options so i'm using grbl so i need to put an output g-code trailer of m5 which uh shuts off my uh my spindle when i'm finished cam machine we set that up earlier everything looks good i think we're ready to go ahead and generate this operation or calculate this operation calculate path and export g code give me a second i'm going to pause this and figure out what went wrong okay so what had happened i forgot um so this is the object right and it is placed at you know z zero up here right this is the object that we're basing the operation off of and down here i had um under cam operation area i had depth from object selected well the object is z zero so i calculated that path at z zero which meant hey don't cut a thing so unselect depth from object and we're gonna go to depth from material this being your material right here why can't you highlight that anyway material so now we can go up here calculate path and export g code and look at that all right so everything looks good we're starting off with zero working our way around this silhouette taking about one and a half millimeter steps down and you see it mines the the bridges here it skips over right there like i said those bridges they'll hold the model to the uh to the material while it cuts that operation looks good i'm going to move on to the next one the next operation i'll set up is a roughing operation so i'll go over here let's just kind of hide that that profile operation for a minute let's go ahead and bring the duke back there he is what i'll do i'm just going to go ahead and copy this profile operation and i'll rename it to roughing and the file name that it exports as will also be roughing the object we're going to swap it back to the john wayne bust which will be right there all right moving on down cam info warnings everything looks good right now material size and position it like that's one of the reasons that i copied the previous operation all that's already there for me looks good operation set up so this will no longer be a profile we're going with uh parallel and parallel just means that it's going to sweep across left to right across that x-axis so we keep going down here now we have a distance between tool paths because like i said we're going to be sweeping left to right and one millimeter that seems good about 30 percent i might go a little bit higher closer to 40 of my bit this is a roughing operation so i'm not too concerned about the quality of the cut as long as it's uh as long as i don't damage anything really and i'll be using bridges again the same bridges from the last operation going down here all right skin so we are going to be leaving a skin 0.5 millimeters and what that skin means is that we will um it's not going to cut to the model itself it's going to leave about a half a millimeter for that of material for that finishing operation to come and clear out and add in all the details so we're definitely using a skin on this moving down to cam optimization i do want to use open cam lib always have it may work well without it but i've always used up a cam lib that was part of the uh installation guide so i put it in there cam operation area we are using layers again we're going to keep the step down at about a half of the of the bit diameter and we're going to use a limit curve and no more no longer a depth from the material on this one we're going to go with the depth from the object and that means it's actually going to use the uh you know the the object as opposed to the material depth and it's not going to go below the material though you'll you'll see what i mean when it comes up and we are going to use a limit curve because otherwise a this uh parallel operation will cut across the entire material and it would be cutting all this down you know to to the material thickness all the way down but we don't really need that because we're going to be cutting this out right i don't really care if this gets cut down so i'm going to use a limit curve and that's going to tell it only operate within the bounds of that curve and the curve that i'm going to use is this offset silhouette the larger one that i made earlier so limit curve let's see offset three millimeter that's selecting this one right here so now the operation will only operate within the balance of this curve it no longer cares about this remaining material out here so moving down to cam movement i like meander zigzag that just means that it's going to cut going both ways left to right right to left that works well for me free movement height did we change this on the last operation you i'll have to go back and look on the profiling operation it looks like we didn't because we copied it over to this one right i need to go change that so 10 millimeters for my machine is too high it actually will hit the the z limit switch and mess up my operation so i'm going to swap this to three millimeters that may not be enough for you that's just the clearance right that's just whenever it's making a fast move a fast travel move it'll go three millimeters above your material go across and down at least that's what i think it is i'm still new to this but i know if it's too high it's going to go up and hit my z limit switch and actually let me go back no we'll finish this and then i'll go back and change it on the profiling operation moving down where was i where was i meter zigzag three millimeters i'm not sure what any of that is but can feed rate i want to keep it where it is about 850 millimeters let's see moving down the cam cutter should be the same cutter from the previous operation 3.175 millimeter end mill good g-code options should be the same i have my m5 at the end to cut off my spindle and of course the machine still there all right everything looks good we'll go up here to cam operations let's save this right quick uh you can't see the menu but i'm saving it yeah save often especially on blender blender cam every now and then you'll have a crash not often but yeah it will crash all right calculate and export g-code let's see what happens okay everything looks good that is the tool path for my roughing operation come out well it looks like in mind that the bridge is there everything's all right yeah it skips the bridges leaves about a half a millimeter of skin you can kind of tell that's hard to see it but i can see that it's leaving that little half millimeter of skin for the finishing pass to come back and handle the only thing i don't like i forgot to change my machine moves a little bit better on the x-axis for whatever reason so you can see right now it's most of the operations done on the y-axis i'm going to change that and to do that let's go over to operation setup here we go angle of paths it's set to zero i'm going to swap that to 90 that just means 90 degrees left to right i suppose you could do 45 and it would go corner to corner if that's something that you would do i don't know anyway i like 90. so i'm gonna go ahead and pause this and recalculate it okay much better now it's going uh you see it the parallel operation going across the uh the x-axis instead of the y-axis that looks much better to me and there's a bridge there's a bridge everything came out just fine okay good deal that is the roughing operation okay next up is the uh finishing operation let's go ahead and hide that tool path okay finishing operation what i'm going to do and save what i'm going to do is go to roughing and i'm just going to copy that one like i said i like to copy as many of the settings down as i can so click this to copy and i'll change the name to finishing the source of data should be the same object yeah john wayne bust going down just go through no warnings yet material size copied from the last operation everything looks good there operation setup is going to be parallel again the distance between the tool paths where we're going to come back to that i will be changing that this is a finishing operation so yeah distance between two paths okay we'll come back and change that use bridges we're still going to use the same bridges nothing changes there like i said all this is already there because we copied the the previous operation so everything looks good now skin we're going to leave zero skin here because now it's time to go ahead and cut to the to the model itself right this is the finishing pass cam optimization use opencamlive is checked good cam operation area we no longer need layers because all of this has been cut out by the previous roughing operation so now we're just going straight down to the model so we no longer no longer need a layer or layers we're going to keep depth from object limit curve we're going to keep that same limit curve from the um from the roughing operation if if you don't remember that's just the bounds within this operation will operate so keeping that moving down the cam movement meander zigzag again i like that it seems to work fine for these uh for these 3d reliefs that i've been doing free movement height three millimeters for me like i said you you may have a little more clearance you may you may have some sort of clamps that you need to skip over you know get past but for me uh three millimeters works fine moving down still no idea what a lot of these things are but can feed rate i've noticed that i can go a good bit faster on my uh finishing pass so i do 1250 you you may not be able to go that fast or you may be able to go faster depending on what you have and here's another thing that's going to change the cam cutter the the bit itself so i'm no longer using a an end mill i'm going to a ball cone and the ball radius oh mine is 0.5 millimeters and the v carve angle on my ball cone i had to look this up as well 4.16 degrees the cutter diameter the that's the shank diameter is 3.175 yeah and it's complaining that our cutter engagement is greater than 50 percent it should be yeah uh 250 percent like i said we were going to go back up to that and we will in one second uh cam g code options we have the m5 for me because i'm using grbl to shut off the spindle all right machine everything else has stayed the same distance between tool paths so 0.5 millimeter radius let's see um yeah we want it to be pretty fine let's try 0.2 millimeters between tool paths that gives us a cutter engagement of 40 let's go a little bit lower which has 0.15 and um this is just like the the resolution of the uh other tool pass out how how many passes it makes if that makes sense so 30 of that tiny bit that should be good um something else to mention real quick under the cam cutter this ball cone that i'm using the actual um the depth of the cutter itself is 15 millimeters which if you remember i put a 19 and a half millimeters for my uh for the thickness of my material and that's right and i'm actually doing something somewhat unsafe you shouldn't do this you should probably go with a a better better bit a longer bit or a thinner piece of material i'm having to extend my bit a little bit further out of the collet i hear that can actually you know be a safety issue so if you're wondering that's why those numbers are off but i don't recommend doing that i'm actually gonna have to find a better a longer bit in the future yeah i think we're good to go i'm going to go to cam operations let's go ahead and save this and calculate path and export gcode and this one takes a while this is a very uh you know precise operation this finishing one i'm gonna go ahead and pause it it may take 10-15 minutes on my machine okay uh we're still calculating but i just wanted to bring up i do like to run this with an open console just so i can kind of see what's going on um see the progress it's been it's been calculating uh this particular operation for about eight nine minutes now like i said i have kind of a slow computer but it just kind of lets me know the progress and also if i have an error instead of a quick little you know window popping up and going away i can open up my uh my terminal and look at the error and really read it and see what's going on it's it's helped me out quite a bit so just a little a little pointer there oh looks like we're nearly done oh no we got to do this part okay still going i'll uh i'll unpause once it's finished here we go take a look let's highlight it and take a look here looking good that's our tool path sweeping along like i said it's just one no steps down or layers as as they call it that looks good beautiful all right there is our finishing operation all right i have everything set up let me go over to my st smart jinbitsu i apologize for the mess uh wait no i don't this is my damn shop i don't apologize for the mess i live like this okay so um got everything set up on my jumitsu i'll go ahead and hit play on cnc js [Music] let's see what happens it should be good [Music] my big one a little bit too fast [Music] yeah i go a little too fast i'm gonna slow it down [Music] there we go [Music] [Music] foreign so [Music] [Music] okay [Music] all right so the finishing operation is just going to go over and get that top half millimeter layer remember we left the uh skin in the roughing operation and this is going to go over about 0.15 millimeters per pass and just clean up everything and [Music] so [Music] okay if you're paying attention you probably realize that i forgot to do the uh the cutout step i just i i guess it wasn't really even needed but um that cutout operation did uh it showed how to generate that silhouette and that does come in handy because these really complicated models uh shapely has trouble creating a silhouette it can crash blender um yeah i'm a little tied up i'm a little preoccupied i'm building a station for my new longmill cnc uh pretty happy about that all right so this should wrap up in the next i don't know hour or something like that and we'll take a look at it okay so here we go it looks pretty good this this dark spot by the eye that's uh that's just a defect in the wood this is cheaper home depot hobby wood so that's that's gonna happen um this up here i'm not sure on the hat it looks like it would be you know dented or whatever but no it's smooth to the touch i don't know what's going on i might try to wipe it out with some mineral oil or something but anyway yeah blender cam is great at uh making 3d relief carbs it's a it's a great tool i've i've looked at a lot of the other tools online and um some of them some of the like the free online ones you don't really have enough control over what you're doing and um the good ones that give you the cut the uh the kind of control that blender cam does give you can run you know three to seven hundred dollars so uh you know blender cam is really awesome you should give it a try alright thank you bye you

Channel: ARC Woodworking

Views: 16,416

Keywords: #blender, #blendercam, #cnc, #reliefcarve

Id: uGqVS176tXs

Length: 41min 21sec (2481 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021