5 axis milling of 3D scanned data (bust)

Hi,

colleagues of mine have 3D scanned a bust of a famous person and provided me with the data.

I need to do the 5 axis milling programming of this bust using a CAM tool.

My job is to use the g-code to program an industrial 6-DOF KUKA robot equipped with a Fischer milling spindle to actually make the bust out of a PU foam or wood block.

I have actually come real far using Zebra3D (much much farther than any other CAM product in such a short time!) and I really like working with this product as it's real easy to use even for beginners.

Attached are few pictures showing a 2.5 axis roughing and a 3 axis finishing job if I'm not mistaken.

By now I just don't know how to invoke the 5 axis milling capabilities in order to rough and finish the areas not covered, yet.

That is, the areas under the nose, chin, eyebrows (the eyes), etc. still need to be milled.

Could you PLEASE help me solving this problem?

I have struggled for so many months with other CAM products and need to make some serious progress!

Clearly, I could turn the bust by 90° so that I'll be able to nicely do the 3 axis roughing and finishing of the face. But then I would also need to work the back of the head as well.

If you need the Rhino .3dm file, please let me know and send me an email address.

BTW: The evaluation version of Rhino crashes whenever I press the "Show | Hide Simulation" button. It would compute the simulation, ask me if I really want to save my file, and eventually crash.

Thanks a lot!

Hannes

Tags: 3D, 5, axis, five, scanned, surface

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rob D. on February 28, 2011 at 7:04pm

Hannes,

That piece looks like you could lay it down and mill the facefrom the front flip it over and repeat.

I don't know anything about the Kuka's special needs. But his job doesn't need to be overly thought through.

4-axis milling would make fast work of this.

Good luck, let us know how things work out.

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Permalink Reply by H G on March 1, 2011 at 1:34pm

Rob,

thanks for your fast reply.

I followed the 4 axis milling as seen in the pics attached.

The conversion from cnc g-code to the KUKA robot language .krl is not so hard and I'll do that in the next weeks.

But still, I really need to study 5 axis milling as this is actually required from our business committee.

How can I do 5 axis milling with Zebra3D? Is there a tutorial around?

Thanks a lot!

Hannes

Attachments:

Zebra3D_Otto_2_Front_Roughing.png, 651 KB
Zebra3D_Otto_2_Front_Finish.png, 371 KB
Zebra3D_Otto_2_Back_Finish.png, 446 KB

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Permalink Reply by Rob D. on March 1, 2011 at 11:08pm

I only know 4 axis. And understand a bit about 5 axis. The 5 axis I know a little about would be where the parts position is changed(indexed) and the mill continues. As I understand it true 5 axis (all moving together) in fluid motion is a really big deal!

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Permalink Reply by Mauricio Montenegro Vargas on December 30, 2011 at 5:17pm

hannes hello I have I done similar work and have not had any problems, using a max nc 4-axis machine, using the axis of rotation, also with a taiga has not given me any problems good luck