HOW TO 3D CNC - Fusion 360 Carve from STL Models

hi guys today i'm going to discuss how i make my 3d carvings on my cnc machine and you can do the same following this quick step-by-step tutorial on how to take a stl or obj file and import that in fusion 360. resize it according to your needs and set up the machining process within fusion stay tuned for that thanks we're gonna open fusion 360 real quick and as it loads pray there's no updates to run and pending no updates this should go rather quickly so on this one i'm just going to walk through how to there's a few ways to upload the file and once this finally loads okay so we can upload the file over here through selecting upload however fusion has a uh insert tool over here we can insert svgs dxfs and this is kind of the preferred method for objs and stl files so i'm going to insert mesh over here the eagle that we're going to carve out and as that imports uh here it is we can orange it the way we want but i believe it yes it comes in default top up that's kind of the way i wanted to fit on my board this can be manipulated later on in the machining area we can also set some measurements here i need to change that document size in just a moment but i'm going to go ahead and leave it the way it is import the file and change this from metric over to imperial real quick so here we've got the model and you can my board is 10.5 inches by tall by about ten inches wide and a little under three quarter inch in thickness that's a one by scrap piece of wood i'm gonna cover that up so over here i show 13.6 inches as my size but that wasn't too accurate if you noticed the tops of my wings are actually higher than the head is going in a diagonal line so this measurement's a little inaccurate and it's going to be difficult to get that z measurement as well so what i'm going to do over here is we've imported the file going to jump into the manufacturing environment and set up some cam settings in here and by since i've measured all this stuff in inches i'm going to go ahead and change that units of measure over in my defense i've i work at a company that does metric and imperial so i end up used to using metric for my fees and speeds but my tape measures aren't metric so i measure the board in in inches so just converted that back over real quick and we'll run through it that way i might have to do a few other conversions during this tutorial but you'll get the gist of it so i've what's created a setup which is essentially i'm telling the cam how big my material is to carve this shape out of uh and what it does right here is it also offsets the side and top by default so i've zeroed those out and that tells me that my actual dimensions of my uh mesh here are 13.744 inches by 10.89 and what i want is to fit that 13.74 and 10 and a half so i'm going to divide 10.5 and honestly it's about 10.6 it's just under 10 and three-quarters so by getting 10.5 then i'm fine so i do that and that tells me the multiplier that i want to scale it by is 0.7639 so we'll go with 0.76 so it's just a little bit under uh that 10 and a half when we jump back in here and if it if it matters precisely what your size is you would use this cut down even more so 0.763969 and that's probably close enough detail to get it almost right at 10.5 for your specific size carve to make it easy enough we could actually just copy this out here and use that number and so now our setup is in there i'm just going to save that so we can go back in this design space and we want to scale it the issue is if we try and scale it up here this is the scale function for a solid body but this is not a solid body it's a mesh so we're actually going to go over here and click edit which opens this mesh design space and there's an icon that looks identical but it's going to scale the mesh and you can just select it here or select here as well and i'm going to paste in that value that i copied over control v paste that in there and now i've scaled it down and now that i've finished that i'm going to close out x out of that mesh kind of say it kind of saves that mesh change go back into manufacturing check my setup here and you'll see that i'm down to 10.5 uh however my z height is 0.76 and after surfacing this board that was severely kept i know it's that 0.61 so i want to change that c height as well so i'm going to do the same sort of thing i did with the y but i'm not going to scale it uniformly i'm only going to i'm going to leave the x and y alone and only scale to c which is actually going to cause a little bit a little bit of loss in the depth detail as the bit goes over it but that's how big my board is so i guess i'm willing to sacrifice that right now there's some other tricks to moving the mesh up and down essentially in this stock if you have space to retain your original detail while kind of cutting it thinner but with these effects like the wings here and they get pretty thin at the edges i don't really want to risk these guys being too thin and just snapping off during the cut or when i have to peel it up from where it's taped down to so i'm going to do the same thing here i measured 0.62 when i measured it but i want to make sure that like i said i didn't measure it incorrectly i couldn't get directly to the center to measure it i measured it from the edges where it was cupped most at so we'll go 0.61 divided by 0.76148 that tells me my i need to scale it down by this amount 0.801 so now that i know that i can jump right back to where i was in this design space the mesh body is right here still i'm not in the mesh workspace anymore so we'll do this one more time edit modify scale and i would change this to non-uniform and once i select the body this will pop up here and i want to only scale the z by that amount and you can see what just happened there is it'll change the detail and if i do it to 0.2 i lose so much detail right because it's now less than a quarter inch thick so it's actually less than a tenth of an inch thick basically because i'm scaling it 0.2 of what it was before so scaling it by that factor 0.801 go ahead and do that now and approve that change go back into this manufacturing environment and verify this setup one more time i'm at 10.5 by 8.3 that's within my x and y and my z is right at 0.61 so i'm safely within the 0.62 that i measured but i measured that on this edge and that edge where it cuts the most so it might dip down a little bit in the middle so just to make sure 0.61 is my z height there and so the next step is to start doing the uh cam process to cover this out and for our roughing pass there's a few ways to do it i prefer these two clearing tools on top adapt adaptive will take a little bit longer to compute but we'll carve it out a little bit faster and having done this already i know it's about two minutes of carve time difference and about 10 minutes of computing time difference so i'm going to go ahead and do the pocket one which computes a little faster so the first thing that pops over here you get this window similar to the setup off to the side where we're going to set up our cam and we're we're going to do that by selecting the appropriate tool and by default it pops up with the custom ones i've made and this taper bit is what i'm going to use for detail so now for roughing i'm going to select one of these samples and for what size board this is and what materiality to take off i know that uh this four millimeter flat end mill it's one of my go-to favorites um it's an upcut for flute that i have on there but i know this default one is not set to the correct number of flutes that's fine um you can change all the settings in there for those tools i have not done that yet additionally my so as a result of that my feed rates are not optimal for my machine so i know my machine can cut significantly faster than this especially during this roughing pass so i'm going to go ahead and set all these feed rates to about half of my max speed is because you'll see later on the program i used to run it i can scale the speed up and down up to double whatever it was set up to in the cam so 180 inches per minute is about half my max feed rate in the x and y and the z is set to about half that so i leave those down here set to 90. and the ramp and the plunge are essentially the same it just this is the as it engages so you could set it to engage with the material slower and then if you're going in a direct path up and down for engagement you can set that as well to a different speed but i'd leave those also to the same so the next step over here is to select my containment of the tool and what this does is if i leave it a bounding box it's going to try and remove all of that stock material from that square i set up and i don't really want that what i want to do is more of that silhouette pattern that you see in the center down there where it follows the contour shape so i'm going to select silhouette and my step down here i know that this is that this tool can go at 0.08 without issue so i'm going to leave it at that for my step down my stock to leave .02 which is going to i'll show you on this pop-up leave material behind in these two directions which my finishing which ensures i don't have too much chip out um and my finishing pass can remove that little bit of material that's left behind if i was to take this to zero there's a possibility that i could if i took either one of these to zero there's a possibility that i could chip out just a little bit of material which then is apparent in the finish after the final pass so i like to leave some stock to leave there and then come over here and verify these are set correctly now one of the things that i that i like to do here in the software is change this maximum stay down you notice that those yellow movements are are the tool lifting fairly often and those are essentially wasted movements so i'm going to change that to be a lot and just some random high number so that it stays down as much as possible and that's about all i need to do here you can change the ramping the way it ramps into material here whether it plunges straight down does a zigzag motion this helix is is works just fine to make it dig in a little faster and not spend so much time going around i typically change that and the ramp clearance height i'll drop that down a little bit as well so basically it's going to start the ramp this spiraling motion at more steep of a spiral and by changing the clearance height at less high up so it's going to make it still going to do a spiral motion but it's not going to be doing it so much in the air now that i've reduced this clearance height so it's going to make it carve a little faster the other thing i need to do here is change this retraction policy to meet what my z height is so my z height can't go too much higher than 0.04 from the top of the material so i'm going to keep it at that yeah i could probably double that and it'll be safe so i like point zero four from where it's at because the way i have a machine set up i don't have a lot of z clearance um but it works fine for running one by material where it's at right now so once that that has loaded i can click on this little eye here and it's going to view it and that's going to show in blue my cam path that we've just created you'll notice if i select top here that the tool is just barely that's the center line of the tool here is this blue mark it's barely going to go around and cut the edge and i don't really want my tapered ball bit when it comes down here which is only half a millimeter diameter thickness at the tip to engage in a lot of extra material around the outside so i'm going to go back and edit this one more time real quick and it's also leaving a lot of stock down below that as it comes down over the edge right so i'm going to go ahead and edit this tool path real quick and change this to offset this by just a little bit so that's going to make it go slightly outside of the predetermined boundary okay and it's going to generate the tool path one more time and once it finishes generating we'll get to preview what that tool path looks like so now what we've done is made it so it can go outside the boundary the thickness of the tool in fact twice over so i don't really need to go that far outside the boundary but we're talking the 17 minute carve here i could shrink that down a little bit so it only goes one tool spacing but just to make sure it doesn't engage this material here i kind of like it the way it is however it's going so deep now that it's actually going to cut the material out it's going to cut my shape out in this one tool pass or come extremely close to it so i'm actually going to lift the bottom of this toolpath up just a little bit by setting this model bottom in here by negative point one so we'll go 0.05 inches and that's going to do is lift that final pass and we'll see once it calculates one more time we'll have a little bit thicker material left a little bit thicker over here on the side not the full height that it was before but it'll be a nice safe thickness so it doesn't cut out and also you'll notice that some of these some of this mesh has uh been shows a different color the pink is that oops negative was the wrong direction so the negative is going to do a full cut out so if i would have read that pop up there i would have realized that i need this to be a positive number and that's going to lift it just a little bit off the side there so as i was saying the mesh here shows pink for a mesh and this golden color for a surface still not a solid body because there are holes in it but it can better turn a surface into a solid body than a mesh but that's why you kind of see these different colors here so somebody must have used a mesh mixer on this file before i got it to use it for 3d printing which that's fine that's how you're going to find a lot of your files they'll be uh either pink or combination that's pink and gold so now we're at 16 minute 59 second so 17 minute roughing pass here and by what i did there and changing that height you'll see i've now got a little bit of thickness there in that material not as much as it was before i went outside the boundaries and also going out to the boundaries cut down on this super tall stock that's next to it so i can either run this through a simulation which is right here and we can play this through i'll speed it up a little bit so you don't have to watch as you speed it up it does kind of jump around and if you want to run this faster you can change the way it uh shows over here this is three axis cnc so i don't need to worry about the other fourth and fixed axises that this program can calculate and display so i've essentially dumbed down the preview to this fast version which allows it to not stutter as much as it would if you leave that on standard so by doing that i can actually increase the quality and keep the quality out extreme without it uh getting hung up or freezing during this playback so i've played it back here if there's a collision error such as the machine is set up the cam was set up to put the tool or the tool holder into the stock at a high rate of speed and basically crash it you'll get a red pop-up and if you select actually let's see what this warning is real quick before i get too far uh one or more pockets were not machined because they were too small that's fine so my pocket's too small for the bit to fit in i'm not too worried about that so let's go back over here to this simulate real quick and i'll show you one more in here so after we simulated it we'll jump through the end you can use this button here to go to the end of the path and you can see the stock that it cut out which just kind of shows the same way as that previous one did but if i now want to jump to any portion of this you can drag the timeline bar down here of the carve basically see what it's going to do and then again in here you can verify the distance of this car is 251 feet and that's how much it's going to move that bit around throughout this process and my machine time as before 16 minutes and 59 seconds so now we've we've created the roughing pass if you're happy with that you can actually run this while you do the next part which is create the finishing pass and it can be done in a few different tools here i prefer the parallel scallop what the scallop would do is start at the center point and carve it from a center point in a circular like motion towards the outside um and that's a pretty neat reveal of the part if you're going to record it and play the video back or the parallel cut as well just basically does stripes back and forth which is less essentially i'm going to just go back and forth on the x-axis and the y-axis will slowly step up and i click the wrong one so we'll go back there real quick and select parallel so in the parallel tool i'm going to not use that four millimeter flat end mill i'm going to use a taper bit here which is kind of like a cone-shaped bit but it has a very small half millimeter diameter ball on the end and i've created this tool myself uh infusion but this is a tool i purchased off of amazon for 20 bucks for a four pack i want to say and i've yet to break the first one i've been using it for a few months now uh it's not worn out and i haven't broken it but i'm sure it is gonna work out eventually because i am essentially cutting dust with this with these super fine passes so i'm going to do the same thing here is adjust that fee right up and my silhouette again is set like this and i'm going to leave it tool outside the boundary and you'll see that what that looks like here on this pop-up so same as before the tool is going to go right on the outside and another thing i want to do here is if i leave this disabled it's not going to get all the way up to the very edge and i want it to so i'm going to so enable this tool point or contact point boundary and come back in here set these to that same retraction i had before and then my step over here is so my tool is half a millimeter or .019 and i like to go about a tenth of that as my step over here so going to change this to 0.002 a little bit over a tenth of the size of that bit because the diameter diameter of the ball it was that .019 so my engaged surface to make a flat i'm going to do passover pass or path if you don't mind the ridges showing you can do it use a larger step over but it is going to show the those steps as lines in the tool path which is going to drastically speed up your machining time but it will show those marks depending on the size of your bit so i like to go about a tenth the bit size for my step over when using a ball in bit like this and my direction is set to both so it's going to machine both directions so there's a waist movement going back to the one side to cut that it's doing super tiny passes so it's not going to make that much of a difference we'll leave this how it is safe distance set that to the same thing it was back here and my maximum stay down is going to be a lot again see what that generates i'm going to hide this roughing tool pass for now and we'll see how long it takes for this parallel one to come up it's doing a lot of super fine detail passes so this can take up to two or three minutes to generate so i'm probably going to speed this up hi so what ended up happening is i realized as as the tool path was generating that i had used a positive number on that um bottom height of that parallel path and that was gonna the positive number actually lifts it and i need a negative number to make sure i'm cutting through so i corrected that and it's running again and i'm gonna simulate the tool path one last time to show you guys how it uh cuts through the edge as soon as that's done generating and i'll be back with you in just a quick second so the tool path is finished for that parallel so i'm going to go in and simulate this car jump all the way to the end and it's going to take a moment to generate this tool path but the big thing i'm looking for here is just this all right so see all the light we can see through here that means that it is cutting through the through the stock as it finishes the generation of this simulation here oh looks like it's done okay what we see here is full cuts through the stock it doesn't generate error that well so so that the cut through doesn't show in too much detail but it shows that you're cutting through the stock and uh so it looks like the tool path is good like i mentioned these these green exposed spots here are what was left from the cutting tool path because of the taper the tapered bit being my file tool path so those are actually rough cuts that are left there um in some small areas but it's so small of an area that you're never going to notice when this when this carve comes out that that there was some rough cut there so what's next here is to export it now out into a g-code that the machine can run so since we have two different tools here i'm going to export as two different files and i do that through this post process most of your g-code type and g-code sorry the gerbil machines are can use this same uh easel exporter and this was really designed for x-carve but it kind of works with um it works well with the x-carve shape hoco 150 and my workbeat as well as the 3018 uh behind me it they'll work fine with the same post processor the issue is that um the negative part about it is that the fusion 360 was recently kind of downgraded for free users and the faster speeds when it's at the safe height when it would normally transition at a fast speed it no longer does that so unless you have the paid version pro version of uh fusion 360 using this post processor is going to make it take a little longer than it did in the past i have other post processors that are more designed for my machine that eliminate that and if you have those post processors then you can do it that way but the more universal ways this easel one which the walkthrough of how to download and install that and set that up is on the um inventables website just anything you search i'll put a link in the description to how to get that post processor and install it um so what i'll do here is simply post put it on my desktop uh that's kind of the default volumes 1001 so i'll just leave it at that since i used a default tool it throws the tool number in here thinking that my machine has the ability to swap tools and it doesn't so this g-code will actually cause a error when you run it if you leave this tool in there unless you have a machine that can do the automatic tool changes and you have tool one set up as your as your um whatever you use for your roughing uh bit so since i don't have that i'm going to go ahead and just delete this line out and then save it you can delete the whole line or just that bit of information it doesn't really matter if there's a space in there or not so like i said save it close this one out so that is the roughing pass i'm going to post processing the finishing pass now head back into desktop here and i didn't bother really labeling that first tool pass because i already have the bit installed but i label this next one with the bit name as well so i know which bit to run this password and since that's a custom bit that i made the tool number is not assigned so there's nothing to lead out i just save it and now we can save this infusion we'll save it as eagle shield mesh and that's going to take it only to save and once it saves the abstract appeal will go away indicating the file is saved all right it also has to upload the save file to the cloud storage which is where all the fusion files are saved they're not actually stated on your computer they're saved in the fusion cloud but it has saved a local version i'm liking on my drive and that's why the asterisk went away but right now it's uploading it to that vision cloud so now i can exit out of there open my gcode center in which case i like the open builds one and once it loads i can just import that and run the code i do have to set my zeros for x y and z but you can see here that since we centered the lovely since we centered the x and y i have marked the center of the material so i know where to place that bit at afterwards so i'm going to actually run the bit off to the side over here zero to my waste board the z height and then bring x and y over to the center that's marked and zero those out using this functionality over here it's kind of neat in this program that you can zero all three independently instead of having to go to an x y and z zero this program will also hold the machine if you have home sensors set up i have those on the machine but since i got you so used to using a smaller machine that doesn't have them i just don't use them anymore and i manually place my machine every time i run it so now it's just time to run the code through either this one or your preferred g-code sender and i'll just play a quick montage of it cutting and check back with you in a moment when it's all done what i'm going to do here is my x and y 0 are set to the center of the of the material i'll set that next what i'm going to do now is set my z 0 to the top of the waste board and i'll do that by toggling down until i hit the top of that i do have a z probe but i don't always use it so it's actually unplugged in a draw right now but i'm going to toggle the z down and send this camera which is a few feet above my mic sorry about that you can't hear me but i'm just going to toggle this down until it lightly grips the paper uh and then i'll actually toggle it down one more just to make sure and set this zero raise it back up uh to save height and now i can run this g-code i have to turn my spin actually sorry i have to go up and set my x and y zeros now that i've got my z set properly because of where i'm at on this material i don't have to have these set perfectly i haven't been pretty close so moves their appropriate locations and then i will set set the zeros right here and now my z has been set to the top of the wasteboard now it's been lifted 20 millimeters and i have x and y set to its current location so now i can simply turn my spindle on and run the program just to make sure it runs right i like to drop my feed right down a little bit for the initial start of the run and now i'm going to run the job and we'll see how it goes you

Channel: SethCNC

Views: 12,473

Keywords: fusion 360, designing in fusion 360, free 3d modeling software, autodesk, 3d modeling, stl, autodesk Fusion 360, cnc router, woodworking, fusion 360 tutorial, autodesk cad, 3d software, industrial design, product design, fusion 360 tips, autodesk fusion 360 tutorial, the fusion essentials, free cad software, autocad, mechanical design, fusion 360 tutorial beginner, cnc, Carvey, evan and katelyn, x-carve, shapeoko, onefinity, CAD, Free CAM, ArtCam, Free CNC softare, f360, CNC Carving 3D

Id: mpnZcgW2k3E

Length: 38min 12sec (2292 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/charliex2]

you can enter the math into places like stepover, don't need to use the calculator. you can type in 1mm or 1in and it'll convert it to the documents units etc and do things like 1mm/2