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The Mill

3DSMax Milling Plugin Beeing a 3d artist myself I was never completely happy to present my work only in pictures and on video. Photos and tapes are nice, but touching and feeling model is irreplaceable in threedimensional design.

I wrote The Mill suite of tools to be able to take an object or a scene out of 3d Studio Max, then have a CNC mill cut a physical model right out of a solid piece of foam or another rapid prototyping material. The Mill can also create negative shapes for molds.

If you are a product designer, forget the foam block, the knife and the file. The Mill cuts and shapes a precise model or mold of your 3d design in less than an hour. No CNC knowledge is needed! The generated file is portable and will run on most CNC mills without further editing. Milling takes about 15 to 45 minutes, depending on the model size and resultion, and the speed of the mill.

The Mill finally brings the rapid into Rapid Prototyping.

MillView V0.9 The Mill suite of tools includes a rapid prototyping plugin for 3dStudio Max. The plugin offers a choice of materials, material sizes, milling resultions and layering options. It exports a .mrm file.

MillView reads and visualizes the .mrm file for review by the designer and by the CNC machine operator. This is the time to edit the parting surface in molds and add gates and vents, or add a support tree as needed for Rapid Prototyping models.

MillView then creates optimized tool pathes for the targeted CNC mill. Tool pathes can be exported in various formats or sent directly to
MillCopy.

MillCopy communicates directly with the CNC mill controller to optimize mill speed and model resolution.

Contact: themill@matthiasm.com