[1 Infinite Loop]

Hi Harold,
It's Jim again and I thought I'd hit this thread too!

You can't engrave pictures in NX but you can engrave text quite nicely. Planar text is very straight forward and it's for engraving on flat surfaces and contour text is for 3-D surfaces.

For engraving I like to use single stroke drafting fonts. Here is my work flow, step by step: Start the drafting application and create a sheet, toggle the Display Sheet button (now the graphics window should look like you are in modeling, even though drafting is still active), create a block of text as would usually do in drafting. Go back into manufacturing and make a planar or contour text operation. You can select this block of text for the operation to cut and the rest of the operation settings should be familiar to you. By the way, in NX6 the operation just asks for text to select; there is no left, right or on. I have only used single stroke fonts so I can't say for sure how it handles other situations.

These engraving operations are really nice to use. I especially like the way you can specify multiple depth cuts and ramp engage moves. I can't remember the last time I snapped off an engraving tool. We use some 1/16" diameter balls but also use 1/32", 1/64" and sometimes use old-school 4-sided tools that range from .001"-.010" diameter with drafts ranging from 5 deg/s to 15 deg/s.

As for engraving images, well, NX can't do that yet as far as I know. Some of the other CAM softwares can do it but I think it's a case of NX customers have not asked for it much. Siemens uses a customer involvement process to add features and make changes to the software. I am not saying that nobody has asked for image engraving, rather that there may not be enough users asking for it. I have used NX since Unigraphics v9 or 10 (It's been a while so I can't remember exactly! I guess I need to start taking Geritol, lol.) and they have been great for gathering user input for changing things.

A little bit of trivia for those who may not be too familiar with NX legacy versions: NX1 would have been UG v19 so if we stayed with the old version convention NX would be at v24. (yeah, I'm a CAD/CAM geek!)