Presented in this paper is a method to generate round-endmill toolpaths for sculptured surfaces represented as a triangular mesh model. The proposed method is applicable in toolpath generation for ball-endmills and flat-endmills because the round-endmill is a generalized tool in three-axis NC (numerical control) milling. The method uses a wire frame model as the offset model that represents a cutter location surface. Since wireframe models are relatively simple and fast to calculate, the proposed method can process large models and keep high precision. Intersection points with the wireframe offset model and a tool guide plane are calculated, and intersection curves are constructed by tracing the intersection points. The final step of the method is extracting regular curves from the intersection curves including degenerate and self-intersected segments. The proposed method is implemented and tested, and a practical example is presented.
