Treacly
02-14-2008, 02:19 PM
I'm still very new to these forums and I hope my posts will be met with positive reaction. I posted on another thread about my use of Blender for product development and CNC machining and mentioned anyone with interest to PM me. Well, I had a couple people interested and was asked to start a new thread about the subject. Here it goes! A little background about myself. I've been using various cad/cam/3d packages since about 1998 and only in the last year+ have picked up Blender. The learning curve was a little steep but, I kept to it and now feel very comfortable using the interface. In the past 6 months my business partner and myself have set up and implemented a ShopSabre 4896 4 axis cnc milling machine within our carving studio (I don't want to sound spammy and link to our site so maybe someone can learn me if this would be proper etiquette here or not). Before I came on board with the company it was only a one man show. My business partner (the owner) is a traditional wood carver with over 10 yrs. experience and a whole list of clients that keeps us happily churning along. He asked me to join him when he purchased the cnc because of my modeling and cnc skills and as well as my experience in the woodworking industry. Now a 2 man team, myself the cnc/modeling tech geek; I have met every challenge along the way and am becoming very effective in the processes involving using Blender along with CAM (I use VisualMill) and cnc machining. We focus primarily on ornate carvings for interiors, mostly kitchens but, other areas as well. I am starting this thread hoping to find like minded people. Lastly, I want to mention (and I'm sure i'm not the first) that I'd like to rally support to create a blendCAM.py script. I have some scripting experience myself (mostly PHP, LSL and general HTML/CSS) but have come to the realization that I cannot do it myself. I have much insight on the subject and do believe I understand much of the math behind the functions required to extract the mesh information and sending it to a post processor but, there are many gaps in my understanding.
Oh yea, the pics... Here is a personal project I created entirely in Blender. It's a wooden fork mounted on a "floating jig" mounted to a 4th axis (representitive of our machine). Notice the tool and holder are represented for clearance purposes. I will offer the .blend to anyone who asks (nicely).
http://www.msersen.net/images/tmp_fork_4_cgtalk.jpg
http://www.msersen.net/images/tmp_fork_render_4_cgtalk.jpg
Thanks!!!
Oh yea, the pics... Here is a personal project I created entirely in Blender. It's a wooden fork mounted on a "floating jig" mounted to a 4th axis (representitive of our machine). Notice the tool and holder are represented for clearance purposes. I will offer the .blend to anyone who asks (nicely).
http://www.msersen.net/images/tmp_fork_4_cgtalk.jpg
http://www.msersen.net/images/tmp_fork_render_4_cgtalk.jpg
Thanks!!!