"Firewater" votive holder

Was looking for something quick to do this afternoon, and something the Mrs may actually want around the house :slight_smile: Decided to make a votive candle holder out of some scrap cherry.

I made the 3d model for this in Autodesk Maya, tweaking their ocean shader, and converting that to displace mesh.

Used a 1/4" ballnose for both the roughcut and final pass, toolpath generated via Meshcam, sent to the X-Carve via Chilipeppr. Whole cut took 40 minutes.

I’m pleased with the results. Slapped some light stain on it, and the grain really popped.

11 Likes

Note, I’ve added the stl to Thingiverse if anyone else would like to cut it.

That’s awesome. I’ve never tried Maya before. I use Fusion 360 most of the time. How does Maya compare?

Maya is very different from F360: It’s (arguably, in the argue-category level of religion\politics for those that are into such things) the most popular 3d authoring tool for vfx\film\game CG development: So it can do sooo much more than Fusion360. However, it’s not a solid-modeler: It deals in polygons, NURBS, and sub-d’s, and isn’t designed for the type of precision CAD work that Fusion360 (or SolidWorks, Onshape, Freecad, etc) is. I’ve just been using it since… 98’? So I’m pretty familiar with it :wink:

Made another one this weekend. Pretty rewarding to spend 60 minutes in Maya, and 60 minutes on the X-Carve:

I wish I knew what I was doing :frowning: Do you use the newest subscription Maya? (It is out of my price range). Can you recommend some good tutorial/videos to follow?

Ultimately I want to create textures and mill them onto table tops.

I modified the original to not be as high and have slightly rounder waves, and that took way longer then 60 minutes for me to modify the file. Memento was used to bring into fusion (quads).

CAM takes like 10 minutes for me. 47 minute cut time, and very little sanding.

1 Like

Hey, that looks great! I really should sand my stuff :stuck_out_tongue:

I do subscribe to Maya, and I’m on the beta, so between those two I have my bases covered. Yes, it is not cheap. But I pay for it since I do a lot of Python scripting in it (all the tools I use to make these shapes are authored in Python). But you can get Maya for free if you don’t want to do any scripting.

To learn Maya, for free, I’d just Google or YouTube whatever Maya stuff you want to learn. Bunch of resource there.
Otherwise these sites (that can have a cost) are probably a good starting place:

Instead of sanding, what stepover are you using? Drop the stepover and the lines/banding will get smaller or disappear.

Agreed, I’m just trying to keep my cut times down right now. I’m using a 1/4" ballnose with a 1/32" stepover. I could drop it to 1/64", but I have a feeling these will jump from a hour cut to say, 1:30. Isn’t the end of the world. But if I have to sand for half an hour it’s a wash :stuck_out_tongue:

I presume there’s some sort of standard formula for stepover when it come to ballnose bits, since the curvature should be roughly the same? I’ve yet to go researching on that yet.

1 Like

I tend to use 40% bit diameter step over for roughing and 10% bit diameter step over for finish cuts.
These were the default setting in VCarve and I have stuck with them.

1 Like

I used a 1/4" ball nose for the entire thing. I used a parallel with 115in/min feed rate .01" stepover for final pass.

For roughing I used 3D adaptive with 70 in/min .089" optimal load, .09" step down leaving .02" for final pass.

Granted I am using a Shapeoko 3 so feeds may very, I had a Shapeoko 1 for the longest time. The key to the fast final pass is running parallel to the X axis ie left right left right. You will have more rigidity, especially if you have the double makerslide.

@AK_Eric Thank you. It is a learning process each day, and I do have access to pluralsight. I’ve got a basic understanding of python, but it is not my first language :stuck_out_tongue:. Have you attempted using Python and the Fusion API?

I do not have a graphic background at all (I write asp classic, vb.net, and c# code for a day job), but I feel like there has to be an easy way to give some dimensions and generate a patterned solid mesh.

First, thanks for that bit info!

I know it has a Python API, but I’m just so hard-wired to use Maya, I stick with it. I have a suite of internal (Python) tools to make it more ‘3d printing \ cnc design friendly’ that grows daily.
I used F360 when it came out… it was super rough, left a bad taste in my mouth. I know it’s improved a lot since then.
If you ever want to get into Python in general, and Python in Maya, I have a couple pretty robust wikis that I update when I learn something interesting:
http://mayamel.tiddlyspot.com/
http://pythonwiki.tiddlyspot.com/
Just do a ctrl+f in your browser, enter a keyword, find the highlighted term on the right column (if you’re using Chrome), click on that to see the available subjects.