Hi there from sunny (NOT) sheffield UK.....can anyone help this old dood with this project idea Im a former geog teacher who really wants to make some cool 3d mountain carvings in lovely oak on my workbee cnc Its been inoperable for the last year due to the conroller f****ing up The KIND FOLK at openbuilds sent me an old new one and HURRAH i'm up and jogging again.......using openbuilds CONTROL as the interface to the machine as before. Soooo Ive had the idea of the 3d maps and started the research....found out about Terrain2STL software and got myself a cool 3d STL file of Snowden (highest mtn in Wales) So now i want to import the STL file into CONTROL and get it routed......have tried but am getting confused....any tips thanks ROY
You need a CAM program that takes the STL file and produces the tool paths/gcode to feed to Control. I know that Fusion 360 *can* do it, but I don't think it's ideal, and there must be others. One problem you may have is that the STL has too many facets ("triangles") for the CAM program - it may be hundreds of thousands, but (IIRC) Fusion 360 gets very confused over ~10,000. You may need to use something like 'Meshmixer' and/or 'Blender' (free programs) to clean up and reduce the number of facets to something manageable before feeding it to the CAM program. It can be a bit complicated, but there are quite a few Youtube videos on the whole process. One example, but there are many: (Snowdon, btw, and its the highest mountain in Wales and England ) Andy (In Wales )
i found touch terrain a little easier to use than terrain to stl. yes fusion struggles with massively detailed stls . i found that its best to get the stl file out of touch terrain as close to the final size that you want hence reducing any work you have to do in fusion. below is one i ran recently of the fairfield horse shoe in the lake district. about 150 x 150 x 30mm in oak.
Estlcam can pull in STL files and generate appropriate roughing and finishing tool paths. I cut a 200mm x 200mm 3D map of Pembrokeshire in Oak from the garden.
