Cnc Milling Tool Material Representation

I'm writting CNC simulator for 3-axis milling tool. At first attempt I have represented the material as WxHxD box (W - width, H- height, D - depth) with W and D divisor parameters.

Solution 1:

As far as I know these simulations are performed on pixels, not on true geometry. Do you need the geometry of the remaining stock or a simple visual simulation is enough for your needs?

Solution 2:

1. Voxel rendering

   You can use compression to free some memory. I would choose RLE at least for one axis (easy and fast) or divide space to layers and compress each as image ...

2. list of 'cube' surfaces

   this is far better suited for your task. At start your material is single 3D box so imagine grid of points along the box surface. When you remove some material from side then just translate intersecting surface points to new position. When you drill a hole (so surface can not match the change) then divide surface to two new ... Choose the grid resolution (points per cube side not per [mm] !!!). I prefer to use cylindrical surfaces not cubic ones because they have just 3 sides (top,bottom,side) in comparison to 6 sides of cube/box.

   

3. layers of polygons

   Imagine that your space is sliced to 2D planes (images) then you can simply remember closed polygon lists per each slice. This is very similar to bullet #2. It is more manageable but harder to implement interactions with tools ... Also the rendering is little more tricky then in bullet #2