Using BlenderCAM with OpenCAMLib

OpenCAMLib is an opensource CAM library created by Anders Wallin. It offers high quality waterline generation and drop cutter sampling algorithms. For drop cutter algorithms it's more reliable than Bullet Physics(Blenders builtin collision detection library) and offers better performance (up to 30 times faster than regular algorithm on 24-core machine).

To use OpenCAMLib with BlenderCAM, it needs to be built from source and installed for python2.7 available from executable path.

Building from source on Debian GNU/Linux (probably also Ubuntu):

Install dependecies:

sudo aptitude install libboost-dev libomp-dev libpython-dev python-dev python-vtk6 g++ cmake blender python3-numpy python3-shapely git libboost-python-dev

Get newest OpenCAMLib from repository(this version is patched for VTK6 compatibility):

git clone https://github.com/ksuprynowicz/opencamlib.git

Configure and compile:

mkdir opencamlib/build
cd opencamlib/build
cmake ..
make

Install (by default in /usr/local):

sudo make install

To use OpenCAMLib waterlines, select "Show experimental features" in Blender User Preferences / Addons / CAM - gcode generation tools. Then select Waterline strategy and "Use OpenCAMLib". Current version lacks dialog for waterline resolution and automatic determination of cutter length, those can be adjusted in "scripts/addons/cam/opencamlib/oclWaterline.py" file. For "parallel" strategy and other drop cutter sampling operations select both "Use exact mode" and "Use OpenCAMLib".