Lightwave3D with Mastercam

[Phooey]

Hi,

Im Pretty new to CNC, but Ive been using Lightwave3D for about seven years, and as much as i'd like to get into CNC, Lightwave is still how I pay the rent.

My Mastercam experience is limited to school. Now, I realise that most of the time a CAD program is the way to go, BUT- for complex organic shapes Lightwave really is better. Each is of cource better for what it was made for.

Ive seen some things (including some threads here) that deal with convertiong between the two, but only to get wireframes, usefull only for parts best drawn in a CAD program in the first place. Converting a Nurbs model to thousands of tiny polys is fine, but its the toolpaths that are then a problem. What i really need is a way to A) 'drape' a grid of cuts across a wireframe instead of following the mesh or B) get surfaces to convert so i can use regular surface toolpath tools in Mastercam. Maybe there is something in Mastercam you know of that does A? seems like it would be a standard toolpath type but it doesn't look like it has it so far. If not, maybe there is a converter i don't know about to go the other route(B)? I have tried Polytrans and "3D Object Converter 3.1". they even support IGES but you still only get wireframe with no surfaces where the polys were. Any ideas at all would be great, because I can't seem to get this to work at all. Thanks for looking at this thread!

Phooey

[ger21]

Won't MasterCAM import a .dxf Mesh from Lightwave? And why don't you want to follow the mesh? I use Lightwave, but not MasterCAM, so probably won't be much help.

[Phooey]

Thanks for your quick reply (This forum is great!). Youre right that a DXF works, but it still only gets the wireframe across. The reason i wouldn't want to follow the mesh is just that it makes a poor toolpath. A toolpath on a heavily contoured shape should not jag all over the place, and it would make more sence to set the spacing, angle of the passes and what not right there in mastercam- its good you use lightwave so you know where i'm coming from when i say it would be tedious to model the toolpath as 2d, extrude it and do a boolean with the object to get the slices of it i wanted the tool to follow (or some other work around like this). Maybe i could make an LScript that would do part of the work there, but it still seems like lightwave is the wrong place to be deciding where on the surface the tool actually travels..... Ill try a few ways to model the toolpath and import that instead of the original model and see if anything like that works. its already, 5:53 AM so i wonder how far i can get before i have to go to bed

[ger21]

So you're saying when MasterCAM imports the mesh, the faces are gone and you're left with just the edges? And MasterCAM will only follow those edges, because there is no surface. Can you convert to a different format, because it sounds like MasterCAM doesn't import the .dxf's correctly.

I'm sure it wouldn't work for all models, but you could just subdivide them finer.

I use MeshCAM, http://www.grzsoftware.com It's great for $100 It will let you set the stepover regardless of the models resolution. The only problem with Lightwave and MeshCAM is that MeshCAM can only read 3D faces, and Lightwaves exports meshes in .dxf's. So I can either load them in AutoCAD, and explode the meshes into faces, or open in Rhino, which will resave as faces. Minor inconvenience, though.

[Phooey]

MeshCAM looks like it does exactly what i was looking for in Mastercam. i'm getting the demo right now. Thanks, will let you know how it works.