Pretty proud of this one boys! Took a lot of trial, error, troubleshooting, and I think I’m on like Option E at this point but it worked! Its far from perfect, but thats ok. Its #1. All thanks to V1E LR3!!
What is it exactly? So glad you asked. This is a topographical map of my dad’s 1200 acre farm in Missouri, USA. Milled on Sycamore directly cut from the farm it represents! I used Touch Terrain to generate the STL. There were 2 hard parts. 1) I wanted to cut out just the farm and not just a square which is usually what Touch Terrain gives you. I finally figured out how to get a .kml file from Google Maps and when you plug that in you can get specific boundaries like this, rather than just a square. 2) I could not find a program that would handle this big of a file. I wanted high resolution, and the goal is to eventually scale it up much larger. I tried Fusion360, that was a joke. I tried Easel, the file was to big. I tried KiriMoto, never figured it out. I tried Estlcam, but again very large file and I use it in a VM which drags pretty hard. Might have eventually gotten it to work. I don’t know. I finally landed on Carveco. Not my favorite program by far, but it handled the very large STL file and generated the cut paths quite quickly. 90 day free trial and after that its $15/mon. I won’t end up keeping a subscription I don’t think unless a bunch of family wants these or something. I had to hijack a work pc to use it too.
All in all, this is one of those projects that took a lot of effort but came out how I planned for the most part.
To Do:
Stepover needs to be smaller. Up close you can see the ridges. I was trying to just get a prototype before I spent 6hrs on a finishing pass or something.
Its hard to see in the pictures probably, but some of the grain is “fuzzy”.
Im not sure what would fix this. It was a brand new SPE Tools carbide ball nose end mill. So I would think it was a sharp bit. Faster speed? Not sure. I’ll have to play.
Some uneven lines on the roughing pass that I need to sort out. The wood was kind of from the scrap pile, and not perfectly flat so I’m blaming it up to that.
Anyway! Sorry for the long post. I’m just super excited and you all will appreciate it more than my wife! Although she did say it was very cool!
Just some thoughts that may help with future efforts:
Sometimes the method of getting the 3D model, results in a model with more resolution than needed — the polygons are tinier than needful, and there are thus too many of them.
As a corollary example, for printing color images, the resolution needed is 300 dots per inch. Yet for printing grayscale photos, surprisingly the resolution needed is half that, 150 dots per inch.
Fusion 360 has a tool feature in its “Mesh” editing tab, to reduce the number of polygons while still maintaining the basic shape. If you ran your mesh through that first, then attempted the CAM process, the CAM software would not be nearly so hard pressed. I suspect the resolution could be reduced while you would still not be able to detect any loss or defect in the final results. I could be mistaken, but this thought comes after years of working with meshes. If you were to either post the 3D model here, or send it to me via direct message, I could better tell whether reducing the resolution would be a feasible approach.
Yeah, I didn’t mention it but I tried this extensively. I think the problem was the file that I got had something like 11,000,000 triangles (Different file than the farm one). Which is probably more than it needs for sure but by the time you get it anywhere near the 10,000 that Fusion wants I had lost so much detail. Which is a bummer because I would prefer to keep my workflow in Fusion. I’ll probably go back and try it again at some point!
There probably needs to be some kind of smart culling tool that would create larger triangles from similar triangles (adjacent ones with approximately the same normals). A lot of the detail is only in a small fraction of the design. Most of the area is pretty flat (to a computer). Sort of how an mp3 (or the newer variants) compress a song 98% from a WAV.
Microsoft 3D builder has a couple of tools to simplify and smooth models, I bet if you opened the stl in that you could reduce the triangle count without missing detail.
3D builder is such a deceptively simple looking program for having such really powerful tools.
I’d probably google for a command line mesh simplification utility. I just did a quick search and there seems to be a few options. I’ve never used any of them, but one of them might work.
I did actually use that on one of my tests and it did work. I didnt know they were dropping support of it.
I ran into a couple of these as well. I didn’t try it as I was getting to the point of it being worth it. Having stumbled upon Carveco, I don’t know why it can handle it but so far its no problem. I know Vectric will handle it to but now we are really talking $$$$$
For me it didn’t allow download, and many others have said the same.
I’m not sure why, but I came across some other people claiming that Microsoft has said they are not supporting it anymore.
Microsoft has a history of doing this, so to me, the writing is on the wall. It could mean that it will stay around forever with no updates, or it could mean it will just disappear at some point.
Autodesk do the same. They’ve Old Yeller’d some really good programs in the past. My favourite being the one that takes a solid body and converts it into stacked slices of a defined thickness or interlocking mesh of however many slices.
