Real-time, dynamic level-of-detail management for three-axis NC milling simulation

Abstract

The Z-buffer based NC milling simulation approach has been widely used in a number of commercial application softwares. However, this approach is essentially based on image and hence it has many drawbacks. Some polygon-based approaches have been presented to overcome these drawbacks, but these approaches are mostly not optimal. In order to achieve real-time simulation, the total number of polygons has to be reduced in these approaches, which results in poor image quality. Using those proposed level-of-detail mesh algorithms can reduce the number of polygons, but the majority of those algorithms are not suitable for dynamic real-time NC milling simulation. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an approach to reduce the number of polygons without much loss in image quality. An adaptive regular mesh decimation algorithm is proposed in this paper. It uses a quadtree to represent the milling surface and enabled flags are used to perform the optimization of the mesh, actual insertion and deletion operations of triangles do not exist. This algorithm can automatically adjust the polygon density to approximate the milling surface according to its changes in real-time, and numerical inspections of any area of the machined surface can be performed with full resolution. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.