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Mcam 18...Can't move geometry to different levels anymore


Dontech
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After opening a new .DXF file from our Eng Dept this morning, I discovered that I can no longer move geometries to different levels.

Our Eng Dept uses Solidworks and my Shop uses Mastercam 18; the company only has @ 4 SW seats but none of them are for the Shop. My company has never thought to train me on SW so I can then train my crew; it's just not something they see as a priority. Thus, anything I ever learned about SW I had to figure out on my own in very limited seat time when I can sneak it.  I am not well-versed in using solid files, though I am making slow but steady progress in teaching myself as I go. Thus, in order to keep projects rolling out smoothly I had to figure out how to convert SLDDRW files to something I could actually use in Mcam...which turns out to be .DXF files which I then save as .mcam files. I have been doing this for years and it always worked well before today. For a couple hours now I have been beating my head against a wall with this latest file. I have a set routine for level management that I have been using for over a decade now and I'm kinda stubborn about it so... The normal change levels dialogue box opens just fine, I can select certain geometries just fine, and it will even let me complete the transaction...but when the dialogue box closes the geometry hasn't moved at all. Every thing on screen happens just like it always does except the geometry itself moving to another level.

Nobody but me goes under the hood into the Options and Configurations pages and I certainly haven't messed with anything in there in at least a couple months now so... anyone have any idea what's going on? Could it possibly be something on the SW side of things? Maybe Eng did something in this particular SLDDRW file to prevent what I'm trying to do? If so it would be a first. Unfortunately no one in Eng is available to ask about it today. 

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29 minutes ago, Dontech said:

I had to figure out how to convert SLDDRW files to something I could actually use in Mcam...which turns out to be .DXF files which I then save as .mcam files. I have been doing this for years and it always worked well before today.

Just a FYI. You can open SW files in Mastercam without having to translate

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3 minutes ago, Dontech said:

Okay...are either of the lights supposed to be highlighted? My icon looks just like yours. I clicked it and nothing happened or opened.

 

In the feature tree that icon will show up on any model un-resolved.

Failing all, do as JParis suggested and restart. Before doing that though make a backup of my mastercam folder then delete

my mastercam folder. When you re-launch Mastercam it will rebuild the my mastercam folder.

Something might have gone pear-shaped there

image.png.a508858d8821477c00f8c3fa1bfcc4a5.png

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Took awhile but I  finally got ahold of the designing engineer and ran the issue by him, who tried a couple of things in SW that didn't work either. He then called the resident SW 'expert' and he said that we've been having server issues around the building all day long, so...I'm kind of skeptical about that being the issue, seeing how the SLDDRW was completed a few days ago and all.

Thank you for the tips and suggestions, everyone. I'm more than 50% convinced that its a SW-related problem so we'll see.

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As it turns out, I now believe this to be a Mastercam problem.

Normally, when I try to move geometry to different levels I will move irrelevant clutter to a new level, not a preexisting one. So when I was trying to do this yesterday, I was looking for the new level # to pop up on the list...which never happened. After beating my head against a wall most of the day I finally noticed something odd; the entities I was trying to move WERE changing levels...but they were moving to levels that already existed instead of newly-created ones. It never occurred to me to track the entity count on the preexisting levels since I was only looking for the new level to appear. I experimented a bit and found that this was happening consistently. Trouble with that is, I cannot control what level the geometry moves to. This is highly problematic, so here I am again hoping that maybe this new info gives someone more to go on in helping me get to the source of this problem.

Apologies for the verbosity; that's just my way.

 

PS...I did check some older programs in case it was a global thing and not simply isolated to that particular drawing...and it turns out that loading any other program produces the same result as this one, thus my new belief that it's definitely a Mastercam issue.

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21 hours ago, Dontech said:

Yeah...I've never had any success trying that. SLDPRT files don't do anything when selected and SLDDRW files just give me a popup that says "Drawing file could not be loaded."

This I think depends on what version of Solidworks they are using, if it's anything later than 2018 or possibly even 2017 then MC 2018 won't be able to open them.

I rarely have issues opening Solidworks models in Mastercam, drag and drop or file open, the solid model always comes in.

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Well...no kidding...mine was set to Named. Never really paid attention to that before it always just worked.

I changed mine first to Range and then to Used Or Named and it worked like a charm. Can't imagine how that was altered because the only thing I ever touch in your screenshot above is the Number box. Never had a reason to alter anything else. Weird. Anyway, thank you so much, AHarrison!

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1 minute ago, Dontech said:

Well...no kidding...mine was set to Named. Never really paid attention to that before it always just worked.

I changed mine first to Range and then to Used Or Named and it worked like a charm. Can't imagine how that was altered because the only thing I ever touch in your screenshot above is the Number box. Never had a reason to alter anything else. Weird. Anyway, thank you so much, AHarrison!

No problem, I'm glad that you have some forward momentum now.

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1 minute ago, AHarrison1 said:

This I think depends on what version of Solidworks they are using, if it's anything later than 2018 or possibly even 2017 then MC 2018 won't be able to open them.

I rarely have issues opening Solidworks models in Mastercam, drag and drop or file open, the solid model always comes in.

 

Ahh, I see. I'm not sure what version they're using but I imagine they've got the latest version. Engineering gets all the best toys. 😁 My shop doesn't get the corresponding Mcam version upgrades very often. In the past 13 years we've gone from 9 to X-MR2 to X6 to Mcam 18over the

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