A new milling strategy of an ellipsoidal cylinder
11/07/2026
How it works:
At every iteration:
- look at all current vertices of the outer polygon,
- select one with the largest distance to the ellipse,
- from that vertex, compute its orthogonal projection P onto the ellipse,
- at point P, compute the tangent line to the ellipse,
- make a cut along the direction defined by that tangent.
Repeat until all vertexes are closer to the ellipse than a given threshold.
The above video was made from a web app which screenshot is given below:
The computation of the distance from a point to the ellipse, that yields also its orthogonal projection on the ellipse is not straightforward. It was made by the same dichotomous algorithm described here.
Work in progress…