Creo 7.0 Surface Milling

[razmosis]

Sometime between 7.0 and 4.0 Creo think tank decided to destroy our most useful sequence.  Surface Milling.  What was done for so long in Surface Milling now has to be done in Conventional Milling.  One can open an older project with surface milling in it, and it works fine.  Make a change to that sequence, such as an added or removed surface, and it "updates" to the new version of surface milling which appears to be useless.  This forces us to make a new conventional milling sequence.

Surface selection in conventional milling is unbelievably inefficient.  No more are the days of dragging a box around a group of surfaces to collect.  The tech support seems to push the Seed and Boundary method of collection.  This works OK for simple pockets with a flat plane at the top boundary.  If what you are milling has a varying top surface, it just doesn't work.  We have tons of projects that capture geometry via Mill Volumes.  To select the surfaces within a Mill Volume, one has to right click, left click over and over and over hundreds of times sometimes to collect the surfaces that you want to "conventionally" mill.

Whatever it is that is wrong with development, it is no small thing.

[SteveLucas]

Razmosis,

I complained about this when they first made the change. It fell on deaf ears as usual. At one point the surface milling was under classic NC Steps where you could window around a set of surfaces, but it appears to be gone now(Creo 8). The only saving grace to conventional surface milling is the mill window option in the reference type pull down menu. if not for that selecting surfaces is a chore like you say.

[KenFarley]

I live in fear of them deciding that Custom Trajectory is not necessary any more, and I'll have to abandon everything. I use that a lot to do roughing on 3D contours. All the "canned" stuff is pretty useless for me on those beasts - using the "normal" set of toolpath types in a previous job resulted in about 70 hours of machining which I was able to optimize with Custom Trajectory paths to about 25 hours. And I was able to eliminate any hint of plunging cuts, thus avoiding the dreaded chip-and-melt endmill deaths.

I'm still chugging along on Creo 4.0 and dreading any updates to later incarnations, because we also use Surface Milling a lot. We make complex contours that need to be finished with a nice smooth ball endmill (they're electrodes), and surface mill is the only toolpath type that has met our needs nicely. Learning that it has been tampered with makes me really uneasy.

[SteveLucas]

Ken, Razmosis,

The classic surfacing is still there just not where i was expecting to see it. 

I think the config setting ENABLE_CLASSICNC_STEPS = YES  needs to be set to see it. It still allows window surface selection but it's the old menu style.

The custom trajectory is still under the classic nc step pull down menu.

[razmosis]

Steve,

I have the classic steps enabled, but do not see surface milling.  Profile Milling, Engraving, Standard Hole Making, Volume Rough, Face Milling and Thread Milling are the only things I have there.

I can open any old job and output the program just fine.  I can edit a parameter fine as well.  However, if I change a surface, it is game over.  The whole sequence gets updated to the new method.

[JoseCoronado · Accepted solution]

Hi Razmosis, Ken, Steve,  I suggest we setup a call to review your concerns, you can send me an email to jcoronado@ptc.com to coordinate date/time, I'll get Development and QA representatives to that call to be sure we are capturing all the concerns at a level of detail to define any corrective actions.

In general, we need to get rid of Menu Manager, so we should continue modernizing the UI. But, also we keep a few hidden configs to preserve old behaviors until we are sure we ported all the functionalities to the new workflows. 

About  Classic Trajectory it is accessible with the customer hidden config: enable_classic_nc_steps to YES under the Trajectory command.

About Surface Milling,I would like to have a conversation about it before give you another configs...

Best Regards

Jose 

[SteveLucas]

Ken,Razmosis

We have a box select fix thanks to Jose and his team!!  I did a teams meeting with them and showed what we used to be able to do to select surfaces and they have a fix !!. It will be in the next update I guess.

So thanks to Jose for listening to us.