Sketch Toolpath that Follows Model Surface

[Anonymous]

Greetings,

I am trying to create a toolpath that follows the surface of my model. It's something I've seen people do in Aspire, but I'd really like to use Fusion 360. In Aspire you could draw your toolpath over the top of the 3d model, and you could easily project the toolpath lines onto the model surface, enabling you to cut a groove of whatever depth consistently across a model with complex heights. Hopefully, the photos below better illustrate what I want to do. 

In the last photo it shows the trace operation applied to the sketch, but the toolpath directly follows the sketch, and doesn't have an option in the operation settings for projecting the toolpath onto the model surface.

Imagine if I wanted to cut a groove the width of my endmill that followed the sketch shown below - it could follow the sketch on the X and Y axis, but have varying heights on the Z axis in order to keep the depth of cut consistent wherever the sketch led it.

 

Now I know I could project the sketch onto the model surface in the Model workspace, and use the Trace operation there - the problem is, this method does not work with some of the models I plan to use - the project to surface operation sometimes has errors, and when it doesn't,  I move onto CAM to setup the Trace operation which forces me to click every single 3D sketch line mapped about the surface. So even if this method happened to work every time, it would still take longer than it would for Aspire to do it. Does anyone know if there is a quick and fast solution to this dilemma?

Any help would be appreciated.

- Michael

[Steinwerks · Accepted solution]

Under 3D Toolpaths select Project and then use the sketch geometry. If the only geometry in the sketch is what you wish to use in the toolpath, you can select the sketch from the feature tree and it will pull everything.

[Anonymous]

Wow, thank you Neal. It was right under my nose. You answered in one sentence what I had spent hours on. And you even thought ahead to the next question I would have asked once I tried the selection. I guess it was just a toolpath I always ignored in my year working with Fusion.

Now the next question I have is concerning offsets with this Project toolpath. I want to be able to sketch a path, and cut outside the sketch path with the endmill. Since offsets are such a common feature with toolpaths, I assumed it would be simple, but I still can't figure out how to do it.

I would like to avoid using the offset feature in the sketch editor, as this would be a problem when it came to making adjustments to the sketch in the history timeline as I do often.

Thanks again for answering the first question! 

- Michael

[Steinwerks]

Sorry about the long wait for a reply! I don't believe there is a way to offset the toolpath beyond altering the sketch (or making a derived sketch of the original geometry). This is part of the trade-off in using a fully integrated CAD/CAM system in that there may be fewer tweaks in the toolpath itself as the goal is easily accomplished through using the CAD tools instead.