Manufacturing > Manufacturing > Mill Geometry > Mill Volumes > To Select Surfaces for a Mill Volume
To Select Surfaces for a Mill Volume
1. Click Manufacturing > Mill Volume. The Mill Volume tab opens. Creo NC enables the icons for only those features that are relevant for the manufacturing model.
2. Click Gather Volume Tool. The VOL GATHER and GATHER STEPS menus open.
3. When you choose Select for the first time and start selecting surfaces to be included in a volume definition, the GATHER SEL menu appears with the following options.
Surf & Bnd—Select one of the surfaces to be machined (seed surface), and the bounding surfaces. Creo NC includes the selected surface and all the adjoining surfaces up to the ones selected as bounding. You will be prompted to select the seed surface immediately after you choose Surf & Bnd for the first time. Then use the following options:
Seed Surface—Change the seed surface, if needed.
Bndry Srfs—Select bounding surfaces.
Bndry Loops—Add outer loops of edges to boundary.
Surfaces—Select continuous surfaces to be machined. All the selected surfaces are included in the volume definition.
Features—Select features to be machined. All the surfaces of selected features are included in the volume definition.
Mill Surf—Select a pre-defined Mill Surface from a namelist menu.
4. Repeatedly choosing Select opens the GATHER SPEC menu with the following options:
Type—Modify the type (for example, Surf & Bnd instead of Surfaces). If you change the type, Creo NC discards all previous selections. Therefore, whenever you attempt to change the type, Creo NC prompts you for confirmation.
References—Modify the feature references. If the Gather Select type you specified is Surf & Bnd the SURF BND menu appears. For all other Gather Select types, the FEATURE REFS menu appears
Once the surfaces are selected, the other options in the GATHER menu become available. You can de-select surfaces, fill or exclude loops of edges, and enhance the volume definition created earlier. The ways to do it depend on the option which you used for surface selection: volumes gathered using Surf & Bnd follow different rules than those created using one of the other options.
At any point, you can display the currently selected surfaces using the Show Select option. Outer (bounding) edges of selected surfaces will be displayed in yellow; inner (two-sided) and silhouette edges—in magenta.