It took at least 5 hours to carve this cross. Can you tell me what can be improved in my finishing pass settings? I used Aspire for this project. Please see below:
Hi. which program are you using?
I am using Aspire
George,
Did you do a roughing pass first with a regular 1/8" end mill or just the ball nose? A ball nose is terrible for clearing large areas, since the tip of the ball is tangent to the flat surface it really doesn’t “move” while spinning relative to the workpiece. So normally you rough that out with a 1/8" straight bit and then do a 3D finish pass with the bullnose to get rid of the Minecraft steps. if the x-carve was a 5-axis machine you could tilt the z-axis slightly to get onto the edge of the ball, but without that you aren’t really cutting material.
red then green arrows
Yes, this is what I do. Roughing toolpath with a straight bit and details with a ball nose bit. What about my settings, please? 
I mean they are certainly fast. Seems the 100ipm is an incredibly fast feed rate. A finishing pass is normally quite slow as you want to just gently move that material way for the smoothest finish. At 100ipm you’re going to get a lot of tearout, and step skip. The bigger time saving is the aggressiveness of the roughing pass. What is your pass depth set to and how much stepover?
Sorry, I missed your message. The stepover is 0.0125"
That’s pretty reasonable for a 1/8", a lot more and it will chatter. The vectric site has a nice 3-step 3D strategy that does super-roughing, roughing and then finishing, Likely cuts out a huge amount of time (easy to check with simulation)
Take a gander at this tutorial, she uses a 1/4" for super roughing and then drops down to a 1/8" and finally a ball-nose.
I often do something similar on my tormach. Where I do first pass 2D adaptive roughing with my 3/4" shear hog and then drop down to a 1/4" end-mill to clean-rough. But the shear hog takes an enormous bite and cuts roughing time massively compared to doing it all with a 1/4". Plus of course a larger end-mill in theory will get a smother pocket bottom (assuming everything else is working right)