How to select surfaces smart in NX CAM

NX CAM QuickTip | Remove selection intent

Heinrich Flaum | 07/26/2022

How can surfaces be selected for editing in NX CAM without having to select each surface individually? If there are only a few surfaces to be edited, this can easily be done by hand. However, if a component has many surfaces, such a selection can take quite a long time. In our QuickTip, we will show you how you can easily define the surfaces you need for editing.

If you want to edit surfaces in NX, they must first be marked on the workpiece. Depending on the complexity of the workpiece, a workpiece can have several hundred or even a thousand surfaces. If a part has such many surfaces, the user is regularly faced with the challenge of how to most efficiently select the surfaces required for machining.

A helpful feature in NX is, that specific machining surfaces can be specified. This allows you to predefine which surfaces you want to select. NX has a variety of suggested machining surfaces, for example Tangent Faces, Adjacent Faces or Body Surfaces and many more.

After you have clicked on "Specify Cut Area" in the geometry tab of your operation, you can select the machining faces.

Geometry - Specify cut area — Go to "Geometry" in your operation and click on the button next to "Cut area".

You can select different machining faces. — Now you can choose between different machining faces.

In our practical example, we select "Tangent Faces" as the machining surface. If we then click on our workpiece, all tangential surfaces will be marked.

It is not uncommon, however, that some but not all of the surfaces now selected by NX need to be machined. In our example, we do not want to machine all tangential surfaces, but only the walls and radii around them. How can we now remove some of the surfaces from our selection?

Learn how to do this directly in our QuickTip!

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Step by Step

In the left area of NX you will find the small window "Cut Area", where you can also see the number of elements.

To remove some of the surfaces from the selection, right-click on the number of items, in our case "137". In the context menu you can now click on "Remove selection intent".

Now you can click on individual surfaces on your workpiece and the selection of the surface will be removed without removing all other surfaces as well. Then confirm in the machining area with "Okay".

Once you have selected all the surfaces to be machined or removed the surfaces that are not to be machined from the selection, you can generate the operation.