It's not always pretty when you peek behind the curtain. You must go back to the original issue in this post. They were not using rest roughing, they were using OptiCore and didn’t understand how we approached boundaries and why. In regards to your comment: You have Stock or a stock model already defined so the space is not infinite. Yes, That's what I said about Rest roughing: 'When you are using Mastercam Rest Roughing technology we only support 'Area/Stay inside' because you are explicitly defining the volume, we do not have to guess the space or volume."

Check as Drive - Yes, it seems illogical that we switch your Check to Drive after you select everything. Drive and Check are simply words, so we let users think they are selecting Drive and Check, but we are honest and tell you we made the Check become Drive. To explain why we do this in that message would be silly as it would be longer than this post If we remove or grey out 'Check' the phones would ring, so we do what we do. It allows people to think consistently while allowing the software to set itself up the way it works. You see, we do not 'machine' Drive data when roughing, we essentially ignore it or stay away from it right? It's actually more like Check if you think about it! When you finish machine you machine the Drive data, you target it, not the space around it. When finishing you need to tell Mastercam to Check against something you do not wish to target hence 'Check' surfaces. Roughing targets the space or volume around the Drive data you select, not the Drive data direct. Furthermore, space around your model is infinite when you're not using Mastercam Rest Roughing technology as rest roughing accurately describes the volume you wish to rough away. So when you are not using Mastercam Rest Roughing technology for 'Core/From outside' or 'Area/Stay inside' we still need to limit infinite space, this is where containment boundary behavior comes into play. Even if you don't select a containment boundary we are using one, we derive one from your Drive selection as a min/max box. Go ahead and rough a sphere with no boundary, why do you think the motion appears to be using a square boundary? All roughing is Rest Roughing isn't it? Are you ever not starting with a stock shape and rouging it away in multiple steps or slices or stepdowns in the real world (3D printing doesn't count )? So we support two ways to approach the boundary when you are not using Rest Roughing technology in Mastercam. We do this because we are guessing what the volume is you wish to rough, you haven't told us so we need some hints and the 'Core/From outside' or 'Area/Stay inside' give us the hints we need to best guess the space or volume to target. 'Area/Stay inside' - boundary is true tool containment, the tool must stay inside or it and machine the space between it and the Drive 'Core/From outside' - the boundary represents the silhouette of the stock shape and the tool is allowed to come from outside it to approach material When you are using Mastercam Rest Roughing technology we only support 'Area/Stay inside' because you are explicitly defining the volume, we do not have to guess the space or volume. So if you want us to approach from outside the stock shape you defined on the rest material page you better make sure your boundary is large enough to allow the tool to fit between it and the edge of the stock you want to approach. Or you can simply go the the Tool Containment page and set the 'Compensate to' to 'Outside' which in essence offsets your boundary making it bigger so you don't have to use CAD to offset your wireframe. Why do we support all these ways to Rough and not simply settle on forcing everything to Rest Roughing you ask? Because Mastercam has been around since 1984 along with other CAM systems we all have legacy behaviors deeply ingrained from the beginning before rest roughing technology existed. Maybe its Dogma...or maybe if we removed everything except Rest Roughing and forced users to define stock everytime they would attack us and complain they can no longer simply 'rough' So Personally- To keep my life simpler when I machine with Mastercam I only ever us Rest Roughing technology so there is only one method to understand and master. I start with a Stock Model operation, define my starting stock shape fixtured to the table and simply begin with rest Roughing. ---It's a Rest Roughing World, is it not?

What version are you running, I assume not X9? In previous versions OptiCore is using 'Material' boundaries not 'Containment'. In X9 we simply did away with the terms area and core and introduced From Outside and Stay Inside, but the behavior is the same as it always has been. OptiCore = Dynamic OptiRough 'From outside' in X9 meaning approach the boundary from outside of it OptiArea = Dynamic OptiRough 'Stay inside' in X9 meaning contain all motion inside the boundary Please notice the interface in X8 for OptiCore does not ask for a 'Containment' boundary, it asks for a 'Material' boundary. The behavior you are describing above is based on 'Containment' behavior while you are using a toolpath that uses 'Material' behavior. I suggest you use OptiRest as it always uses 'Containment' behavior. it will still approach material from outside if it can fit between the boundary and the edge of your stock model shape.

This issue is corrected and scheduled for a future update.

Can you Please send me this file? We have fixed something recently and want to test this file....

Yes, they grey out. Dynamic Optirough will always try to approach from outside remaining material where possible. But you must make sure the tool can fit between the rest material and your containment boundary. Setting containment to outside and using the additional offset field will save you from having to manually create a larger boundary.

No I see the problem after tying to reselect all. We will dig in.

I tried this in X8: I just created 10,000 points, create a drill op, selected them, processed and backplot all in less than 30 seconds.

This might help. This video will self destruct in 1 hour... http://www.screencast.com/t/dClWCCIK

close, draw the tangent lines at the tangent contact point of the tool and part.

Please don't think material is in the mix here, it is absolutely not. Multi passes are simple 3D offset passes out to where the reference diameter would have made its two tangent contact points if you are auto-calculating, of course you can simply tell it to offset a hard number of passes if you wish. I assure you it is not using a material model I just received an email from one our Mill programmers responsible for 3D toolpaths telling me my explanation was correct, no material model in play. He did say your explanation was pretty good, not too far off

Has nothing to do with material, I'll try to explain. It's a bi-tangency angle, 'bi' meaning 'two'. Your selected tool makes contact on 'two' tangent locations of the tool's radius along a corner with a sharp or a radius less than the tool's radius, that is where it chooses to pencil trace or 'roll the ball'. The bi-tangency angle is the max angle between the two tangent lines extended from these two tangent locations on your tool. The angle must be less than the bi-tangency angle to consider it a corner to receive the pencil trace. Please understand that there is no material in the game. Think of it as rolling a ball along the corner of a shoe box. That's where pencil chooses to trace, then it ensures the angle between the walls and floor is less than the bi-tangency angle. So you have two criteria that control the pencil. Imagine rolling a 1in diameter ball along the corner of a shoe box with .25in fillets, it would be easy because the ball can touch the wall and the floor surfaces and roll nice and straight. The bi-tangency angle is what gives the ball it permission to roll there. The angle between the wall and the floor surfaces between the two tangent points of the ball must be less than your bi-tangency angle. Now try to roll the 1in diameter ball along those same corners if there was a 2in fillet between them. It would be difficult to roll straight as the the ball is not able to make contact with the wall and the floor with two tangent locations rather it is using only 1. In this case there is no bi-tangency angle to check to see if it has permission to roll there. So first it must be able to roll with two points of tangent contact and then it must ensure the angle between those walls are less than the bi-tangency angle in order to have permission to roll there. Hope this helps

This fix in X7 MU2 is a long shot...

We have made progress. We are testing an approach to reduce the high retracts at this time. Hopefully this method checks out and can be incorporated into X8 safely, which is right around the corner...a technical preview of X8 is already in our users hands.

Happy to hear all this. We have forwarded this thread to our programmers directly responsible for these technologies.

Yes, a known issue. We had to change things for X7 which introduced this 'problem'. We did it because people were bumping holders into rest material stock before this change in X7. It was a luck thing, you might go years without any issues and then that one job comes along with the right conditions and your holder collides with rest stock. There was no awareness of the rest stock's update shape as you roughed during linking. We made a quick change to ensure safe motion, which potentially introduces these high retracts. We had to choose safety over potential collisions. We are currently investigating another incremental improvement to address these high retracts. This is a very active subject in Mastercam development at this time. The whole reason this has come to be is because never before did a rest rough toolpath step down and then step up. Standard rest rough linking could always assume there was no rest stock above the active stepdown so the linker could simply clear the previous stepdown Z location for a retract height, you could absolutely trust in this assumption. Trustworthy assumptions save processing time. But this assumption has proved not true for OptiRest, the linker cannot assume all Z locations above it have been cleared. So the long term solution is to engineer a live in-process stock removal calculation so the linker will know the exact shape of rest material at any given moment in the toolpath when it has to sort out linking. All that while also not introducing significant processing time! That is not an easy project. So for now we have what we have, safe motion, and we are working on yet another incremental solution to improve things further. Then we tackle a robust long term solution...

Those moves are linking moves, which are permitted to move outside the boundary. You must have a very large value for your 'keep tool down within' field on the cut parameter page.

I'll be expecting those flowers....

Thank you, Hybrid has behaved this way since day one. We can look into fully containing the linking within the boundary, but no promises. This is not the only toolpath that behave this way relative to linking moves. Nothing has changed for Hybrid in X7 relative to containment. But we continue to improve Hybrid and will look into your boundary concerns. You comment about staying inside boundaries for X7 in the very first thread is mistaken. It was only implemented to improve OptiRest and Rest Roughing. Cheers

Send data for us to investigate.

I still see no hard information or sample file in here. Would love to look into something concrete....

It's going to get easier, stay tuned...

Why turn off adjust cut on the rest material page? You are choosing to rough with Ball nosed tools. Turn on the 'adjust remaining stock to ignore small cusps' and set it to .01 on the rest material page. Do you really want the rest roughing to mill every cusp the roughing left behind, you roughed with a ball if you didn't want cusps why us a ball? turnig this funtion on, as most users will do for rest roughing, eliminates the OP3 pass on the floor milling all the cusps, reducing the processing time of OP3. Before adjsuting the above I was over 6 minutes. After turning on the adjustment functionality I'm at 4 min

You are all free to download the X7 preview and try it out for yourselves if your maintenance is current. Any comments you might have after trying it out can be forwarded to [email protected] http://www.mastercam.com/Support/Downloads/MastercamX7/Default.aspx

Toolpaths drop down menu - Wireframe