In this lesson, we'll be creating an adaptive 3D clearing tool path. After completing this lesson, you'll be able to; create a 3D adaptive clearing tool path, modify tool path perimeters and use simulate to validate a tool path. For this next lesson, let's go ahead and upload the file complex 3D adaptive clearing. This file has a set-up but it doesn't have any tool paths yet, because we want to explore how we can use 3D adaptive tool paths to remove a lot of this material. To get started, we're going to go in and select 3D, adaptive clearing. Then we want to select a large tool. In this case, we're going to go in and we're going to select from our library, tool number 10, the half-inch flat end mill and say okay. Notice the size of the tool in relation to the part. This tool is not going to fit into some of these areas and won't fit into these smaller pockets. It won't be able to drop into these bores. So it's going to have to do some calculations and figure out what it can actually cut and what it can't cut. One of the benefits to using a 3D adaptive tool path is the fact that it can take large Z cuts down to remove material and then it can do small step ups, backup the part to get closer to the final geometry. We're going to allow it to use the stock contour which is the original size of our stock. We are going to turn off rest machining. Because this is our first operation, we're not looking at any material that's left behind by previous operations. For our heights, this is where we can tell it exactly how deep we want the tool to go. If we want to focus on everything above this phase, for example, we could restrict the tool from going down any deeper. However, I want to allow the tool to drop down into all the geometry, so I'm going to leave it set to the bottom. For our passes, using the 3D adaptive tool path opens up a lot of options. We're going to try to talk about as many of these as possible. So to get started, the first thing that we want to do is we want to turn on machine shallow areas. We're going to turn on the option to use slot clearing. Now, slot clearing is a different approach to removing material. You'll notice the graphic that pops up with the tool tip, allows it to take an approach of using an offset from the outside. So we're going to see how the slot clearing option works in this case because we have somewhat have slot geometry in here. But, ultimately, it's probably going to get turned back off. The slot clearing width, you see that it has a value here of 0.6 - 5. We're going to go ahead and leave that on as well. Direction will be climb. The maximum roughing stepdown and fine stepdown, I'm going to leave. I am going to turn on flat area detection, which allows it to attempt to detect the heights of our flat areas. For example, here, here and here. This way, it can actually go down in a machine at those levels rather than using the default maximum roughing stepdown. We also have some ordering options which we're not going to turn on just yet. Then we're going to make sure that we leave a little bit of stock and we're going to use all of our default linking parameters for now and say okay. So we want to see how it approaches this part, get an idea of what it's doing in terms of removing the material. So far, everything looks pretty good and it's not really using too much in terms of slot clearing. But let's simulate this and get an idea of what it's doing. I'm going to hide the tool path because I only want to take a look at the tool motion. Again, I'm going to manually drag it. This allows me to go as fast or slow as I want. So you can see essentially with the first path that it goes through and it takes that large amount of material away. Then it starts to take care of that tapered wall. The tool is slightly going into those recesses, those pockets that are on the face of that taper. So it gets pretty close in terms of that geometry, then it moves on to the next section. You can see now as taking a look at the bottom part. Then as we go farther, the tool never drops down any deeper than what we see here. So as we look at this, you can see that the tool never does get down into that pocket. So let's make some adjustments to the tool path and see what we can do in order to change that. I'm going to first start by turning off slot clearing, then I'm going to allow it to regenerate and see if that makes any change to how the tool actually engages our material. One thing you'll notice is we no longer have that helical entry that was directly in the middle. If we simulate this, again, just using our cursor, the first part looks about the same. Then it comes over here and starts to clear this area and all that looks about the same. Essentially, it looks very similar. We haven't really changed too much. But we do know that there is not a helical entry here anymore that we saw when we had that slot clearing option. Now, if we go back to our passes and take a look, we have the option to cut both ways and we're going to turn that on. Again, we'll leave those default settings and we'll take a look. Again, once it calculates, let's go ahead and simulate this using our cursor to drag through here. You'll notice that now as it's machining, instead of picking up and jumping across the part, it's going back and forth to clear that geometry. So you'll notice, in some cases it's still picking it up and moving it back and forth. But in others, it's actually going back and forth during a climb in a conventional cut. So this does tend to save us a little bit of time but there is a detriment here. Because this is a roughing operation, it's probably not going to be a big deal. But the tools are more efficient in general when you're using all climb cuts or all conventional cuts. So as we look down here in some of our other options, you can see that we have our maximum roughing and fine stepdowns. I'm going to reset this value to go a bit deeper, all the way to half inch. Then you'll notice that it does adjust some of my other parameters. So a lot of these are linked and if we right-click in these boxes, you'll notice that we have some options to edit the expression. Right now, the expression is set to half inch but the expressions will allow us to relate some of these parameters to other perimeters inside of this passes section. Later on in our course when we start to explore some more advanced topics in terms of setting up these tool paths, we'll get a little bit deeper into that. But it is a fun topic to start to talk about by right clicking and editing expressions, figuring out how to link some of these parameters together. So that way you can save yourself time if you're cutting a lot of similar parts or doing a lot of similar operations. The next options I don't want to take a look at are ordering by depth or ordering by area. First, we will turn on ordering by depth, say okay. We'll take a look at how the tool path changes. Because we're dealing with a large open area, it generally doesn't change much in terms of the tool path that we're creating here. But, let's just take a look and run through, make sure there's no drastic changes, and then we can go back and explore another option. If we turn this off, then we can order by area and say okay, and allow it to recalculate one more time. I'm not expecting to see any drastic changes between these. You really start to see it when you have multiple pocket regions on a part at the same level or you see different kinds of geometry that'll be affected by ordering by area. So for our purposes, it hasn't really changed much. The only thing that we're really seeing is a lot of these rapid movements and we can make some adjustments to those by going into the linking section and changing our retraction policy to minimum retraction. This will likely change how the tool lifts as it moves from one side of the part to the other. You may notice that we might get the tool a little bit lower in some areas, but overall it's still jumping up to those planes where we have our clearance and retract heights. The last thing that I want to take a look at on this file is by editing the adaptive and changing the tool. I want to take a look at what a smaller tool is going to do. So I'm going to go into a quarter-inch tool number eight and I want to see if the quarter-inch will drop into some of these other areas using this adaptive tool path. So you can see, it's already taking a little bit longer to calculate and we see on the screen right away that it is moving down into this pocket now, but it is staying away from these bores. So now, with this tool path selected, let's go up to simulate and let's go ahead and drag through here. So you can see now it's changed the order of operations. It's machining the lower section in the pockets first, and then it's moving its way back up that wall, and it's coming back and it's doing a little bit more clearing. So using a smaller tool and allowing it to actually get into some of those areas does change the way that it orders it's cutting process. Instead of removing the bulk of the material and then moving its way up that wall, it continues to go down into this pocket before it starts the machine back upwards. So this gives us a really good starting point to come back and do some rest machining and finishing operations on this geometry, but that's going to be a topic for a later time. So once we're done here, let's make sure that we save the file before moving on to the next step.
