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Modeling in Mastercam 2021


Coco
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1 hour ago, Coco said:

What is better to mill from: a model made with "Solid"  or a model made with "Surface?" 

It's usually better to start with a solid. It is easy to create a surface from a solid face. More complicated to make a solid "solid" from a hollow surface model.

It is also easy to create a curve on a solid edge to make wireframe.

Surfaces and solid faces can be useful for different applications.

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Solids normally by their very nature are what we call watertight. They will be sealed and the edges of each face will be perfect one to the other. I said normally there are those times when the file was exported with a bad tolerance or the CAD Software does a poor job exporting the file and that is not the case. The other issue is the reading of that file into a software can be an issue. Much better than 25-30 years ago when solids were not the normally method and everything was surface models. Surface models by their very nature are not watertight. That means the edges of one face to the other can have gaps and mismatches and be considered still a good surface model. Problem with Solids is the files sizes are much larger than surface models. Now with what is called tessellation by most CAD software to make files lightweight in the CAD to give them speed they are really STL files and not surfaces or solids. People start ignorantly exporting them with 60,000 faces that would be 20-30 surfaces or one solid body and then wonder why people have a hard time machining them and making good part from that junk. Great for 3D printing since they use STL as their go to method to print parts, but for CAM really not the best method. Solids are just that they are a Solid shape with Mass. Surfaces are just thin sheets wrapped around a shape with no real mass. STLs are triangles to represent that shape. Depending on the size of the triangle the less or more accurate it looks like a solid or a surface, but it is in all reality is a counterfeit of the real thing.

Solid Modeling

Surface Modeling

STL

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