My employer uses Mastercam to generate programs for the mills/lathes, lasers, and plasma. I have some .blend files with models I’ve been wanting to send to the guy who makes laser plots, but I am afraid to approach him with an export format that turns out to be weirdly-formatted - or worse, broken. I’m on Linux, so I can’t use the usual professional CAD software. Or at least, I don’t have the horsepower to run professional Windows CAD software in an emulator.
I messed around a little in FreeCAD, but I eventually decided I wouldn’t want to trust anything it produced. Maybe I’m wrong about it. I then tried OpenSCAD, which feels much more solid (and it’s kind of addictive, too)…but again, I’m not sure I can trust it to spit something out that will be easy to import to Mastercam.
Does anybody have any experience with this? SPECIFICALLY with importing to Mastercam?
According to Google it can import STL (which is my default for 3D printing) as well as DXF. I remember there used to be a DXF exporter for Blender, but I’m not seeing it in the addons list in v3.6. Ideally I could export something parametric rather than a mesh/poly file (like STL). And…uh…something that wouldn’t require the guy to run through a long import wizard to make sure it loads correctly. Maybe a parametric conversion from Blender would be impossible, but…just thought I’d ask just in case.
I have built some systems to generate step files from specific blender output, but it is a challenging, multistep affair that requires a fair bit of knowledge on the eventual cam output.
dxf output is there (It’s available as an extension), and it works ok. But simply converting a polygon mesh to a polyface mesh and exporting as .dxf is not going to make any CAD jockey happy. Same with an STL.
I’ve done some very large CAD projects with integration in Blender, and it can be done, but it is extremely contextual:
This was a project I did in collaboration with a burning man artist last year, I was provided a 3d model and needed to generate cut paths to make the form out of plywood. I had a pretty beefy geonodes setup to detect intersecting planes and generate the appropriate notches so the pieces can fit together like a wooden dinosaur puzzle.
Ultimately, the output was 2d profiles, which can export pretty cleanly via DXF. Though even that has it’s own issues. Ideally, a .dxf would be assembled out of circular arcs and straight lines, which meet tangentially. This results in smooth motion for the end effector of the cnc. The dxfs from blender are just faceted lines which need to have curves fit to them in order to cut cleanly and well. I’m working on a significantly more complicated sculpture this year that required over 3600 individual pieces. no way in heck I was gonna manually fit curves to those faceted lines, so I vibecoded a script in QCAD to do curve fitting and some other CNC prep operations.
What type of machinery are these files going into?
These are simple 2D laser cutouts for a Trumpf TruLaser, which cuts flat plots on a big bed. My hope is that he can just drop the models into some extra space in a plot.
I just checked again and I see the DXF exporter addon in Blender v3.6 (the version I use), but it’s marked as ‘under construction’. But if it exports segmented shapes, I guess it isn’t worth trying to run a later version just to have access to it.
I do not know enough about CAD… but you may also try FreeCAD (at least it was/is the least cumbersome for me maybe because of some “history” of GUI in CAD sodtware ? )
I played around with it, but the workflow was very fragile with weird bugs I kept having to work around. It may just be that I was using an older version, though.
I am going to familiarize myself with QCAD this weekend.
Also, it turns out the engineers all have their own unique software preferences, and the guy who does the plots uses something called ‘Boost’ to translate the various formats. So far I haven’t been able to find it, since searching for ‘Boost’ is like searching for ‘The’ or ‘Website’.
Well, dang. I searched for “Boost CAD”, “Boost Program”, “CAD program called ‘Boost’”, and…I don’t know. A million different combos. I guess the winning keyword was ‘software’.
Because that’s completely different from ‘program’. Apparently. Or ‘App’, as I found out just now with a few more searches.
maybe because of some “history” of GUI in CAD sodtware ? )