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2021, File Expansion when creating solids?


nperry
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Thankfully I've got backup files and have worked around it so this isn't urgent so much as it is to satisfy my curiosity whether anyone's seen this before. 

I have what was, as of yesterday, a moderately sized file. I've been chipping away at the fixturing and how I'm going to do the job and this morning I finally nailed it down. During some point between creating my RH setup and mirroring to a LH setup this file size blew up into something upwards of 1GB...which is insane when you look at the file. 

What I did was grabbed a backup file that I know has all of the toolpaths and geometry I created, saved the trouble solids as steps and imported them into the backup file that way. So I've got everything I need in one place, but still had to do some finagling to save my work and have a file that isn't slow as molasses at the same time. 

I think the issue is on levels 109, 110, 111 and 112. I created the solids on 109 and 110 and then mirrored those solids to 111 and 112 respectively. When I try to "save some" off of those levels into a separate Mastercam file they save with a gigantic file size. When I save them as step files they save small. I'm not sure about the functionality of save some and the difference between saving them as an Mcam file or step file...so maybe it's normal. 

 

I was planning on sharing a Z2G here but it's over the limit. Here's a dropbox link for anyone interested....

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9r1rfdpq9ldk9p/B1-50-1131-P2.ZIP?dl=0

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what i do for left hand and right hand mirror imaged parts is program one complete, save it as one name like Left hand, then i just save as again and save it as right hand.

then in the right hand part i just activate all levels and show all geometry, window select it all and mirror all of the geometry over. 

From there all that needs to be done is simply reverse the chains for toolpaths that follow a chain direction, like contour for example.


that has always been the easiest way for me to do it, just make sure Transform mirror is set to Move instead of copy so all the toolpaths remain associative to the mirrored geometry.

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4 minutes ago, JoshC said:

what i do for left hand and right hand mirror imaged parts is program one complete, save it as one name like Left hand, then i just save as again and save it as right hand.

then in the right hand part i just activate all levels and show all geometry, window select it all and mirror all of the geometry over. 

From there all that needs to be done is simply reverse the chains for toolpaths that follow a chain direction, like contour for example.


that has always been the easiest way for me to do it, just make sure Transform mirror is set to Move instead of copy so all the toolpaths remain associative to the mirrored geometry.

Yep, same method as me. If the file is small enough I might keep it as one, but this job will most certainly be broken out into two files at some point.

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It's not really a question of methodology, I don't think. Even if I delete every solid in the file, plus all of the cutter paths, I still wind up with a file that's over 1GB.

Something happened with the file during some very simple extrude/mirror operations, I think, and although it's not urgent to get to the bottom of, I'm really really curious about it.

I forgot to mention until now that using the repair file feature yields no results.

uncool.png

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