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Extruding letters evenly into or onto surfaces can be tricky in Mastercam, here's how!

First, what is embossing and debossing?

Embossing is when you have raised letters or logos, or any shape for that matter, on a surface. 

Debossing is the opposite, it's when those letters or shapes cut into a surface. 

These are both common when dealing with text on a model. If you're dealing with a nice flat surface for your emboss or deboss, this is pretty straight forward in Mastercam. You would either do an Extrude Cut, or an Extrude Add Boss to the existing model. When the surface or surfaces are not flat, even emboss or deboss can be tricky. 

In the video above, I'll walk you through a couple different processes for achieving an even cut or extrude onto a form in Mastercam.

The best method in my opinion, is to extrude the letters as individual solids, long enough to extend past where the final floor or ceiling of the resulting shape would be. With these extrudes, you will need a surface that represents the required floor or ceiling. This will be used to trim the extrudes that you just did. Using the Trim to Surface function, you can now trim your extrudes with the created surface. Finally, use these new trimmed extrudes in a Boolean operation. Your original form is the target, your trimmed extrudes are the tool. You can then do an Add or Remove depending on your need of Emboss or Deboss.

You can also do a similar operation by using Impression. The difference with Impression is you can only extrude one chain at a time and you need to target a solid face instead of a surface. You would use the resulting solid in the same manner above with a Boolean function. 

Lots more items covered in the video, so check it out too!

For the quick overview, skip to 10:19 in the video.

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