When most people need five axis toolpaths they reach for a commercial package, because FreeCAD's own multi-axis CAM options are thin on the ground. This maker is taking a different route: building a separate CAM plugin for FreeCAD, and the early results look promising.
The simulation runs inside a CAM program, showing a five axis CNC milling machine with a grey spindle housing and a large circular tilting rotary table. The cutting tool pairs a blue holder with a gold-coloured cylindrical cutter, working on a solid grey rectangular stock block. A 3D preview draws green and red toolpaths across a curved surface. In the sequence, the tool descends into the workpiece to cut an initial curved track, then the table tilts and indexes while the tool keeps running continuous multi-axis passes, with the next line covering a 180-degree turn.
Two details stand out to me. The menu bar already offers 3 Axis, 5 Axis and FreeCAM entries, so the plugin is shaping into a full toolkit. And the maker reports the new calculations come out much faster than usual on 3 axes. The approach simulates by row rather than by time, advancing per line instead of following axis speeds, which reads to me as a genuinely different philosophy from most motion-based previews I have come across.
It is clearly still a work in progress. The maker says the five axis work currently produces too many errors and is awkward to use, and there is a blind spot when the tool sits in the middle of the model, where the simulation shows nothing. Big jobs can take over 20 minutes to calculate, and FreeCAD CAM does its maths on a single core only. The source code has not been shared publicly yet, and the maker is asking whether anyone in the community actually uses CAM.