Touchcutter: CNC Milling with Touchdesigner

Hey everyone! This thread will be the temporary homepage for Touchcutter.

I’m cutting 3d shapes into wood using touchdesigner. I’d like to share some videos of the network and discuss the technique in the videos. The videos mostly discuss 3d raster milling using a raster image as the source & TD workflow. I’ll be sharing this at some CNC forums as well, hoping to draw some CNC talent to my project.

youtube.com/playlist?list=P … LfK3SPbsTK

CNC information:

-The technique can be modified to cut from sources other than a raster image (ie TD’s rich SOP environment), Touchdesigner’s environment can be used as CAD, Touchcutter can route that into CAM. Other milling paths more efficient than raster milling can be implemented for 3d paths. 2.5 and 2D paths are easy and highly configurable and can be in any form.
There are hundreds of shapetypes of CAM toolpaths that exist, I’ve made examples of lithophanes , multilayered 3d rasters, various simple 2D paths, etc. Once your idea is conceptualised, they can be accomplished readily. As a group we can come up with a large number of toolpaths for specific functions. I’m sure we could really push the CAM/CAD functionality of the software.

-Gcode is highly configurable. You can modify my component to produce g code for any machine, sender, or reader. You can likely even 3d print, laser cut, draw, or do any type of 3 axis Gcode manufacturing with it fairly readily (I have only a router so I havent tried anything else).

I’ll be posting about this at some CNC forums and hope to bring some others here for the discussion.

Shoot me a message if you want to collaborate, I can start passing on the files. I plan on publicly posting some cleaner network files with some documentation in the future as the project progresses.

Cheers.

G code producing was brought up in a previous thread by dogboy23. I’ve implement the Idea Matt suggested in there, thanks. Also thanks Matt for the tip on custom filetype renames, I’ll study how to do that in Touchcutter later on.

viewtopic.php?f=27&t=8945&p=36485&hilit=cnc#p36485

2 Likes

wow - impressive!!

Nice work!!

Hi @bwanajh! Very curious if this is something you further developed in the last five years. I am looking for ways to control a 2D plotter directly from TouchDesigner and I feel I could learn from your experience.

Sorry for the slow response Asaro

This is how I first dipped my toes into TouchDesigner. I did most of the designing in TD, but I would use Touch to create everything then export to gcode. I used off the shelf g code senders to send to the machine.

I did play a little bit with direct communication via serial, but I never followed through. It is something I may revisit though.

I expect to do a bunch of milling in the next few years for a renovation project, and I will be re exploring and updating all my CNC projects. I won’t be cutting anything until next winter at the earliest.

In the meantime I would be glad to hash out any ideas that I can help with. Perhaps start with a specific question or example tox file and we will go from there. I know a lot more about TouchDesigner now than I did then. I probably knew more about CNC milling then, but I could use a refresher!

Did you ever end up sharing the toe file for this workflow?