Jump to content

Welcome to eMastercam

Register now to participate in the forums, access the download area, buy Mastercam training materials, post processors and more. This message will be removed once you have signed in.

Use your display name or email address to sign in:

Refugee from Fusion 360 looking for advice


RecceDG
 Share

Recommended Posts

Good day all.

Once upon a time, I was the engineer for an auto racing team. Big chunks of my job was designing parts for manufacture in a HAAS 3-axis mill. I'd do up the part in Solidworks, give our machinist the Solidworks geometry and a drawing, he'd tell me how he couldn't make it, we'd argue for a bit, he'd get revised geometry and a drawing, and a part would find its way into my hands.

He used MasterCAM as his programming tool, but I never touched it. Solidworks part file and a drawing to express tolerances and intent and my part was done.

Fast forward a whole bunch of years, and now I have some small-scale CNC machines of my own - an XCarve 3-axis gantry router, a Wabeco D2000 2-axis lathe that I CNC converted myself, and a G0704-clone 3-axis mill that is destined for CNC conversion as well (I'm building the control box at the moment).

I had a copy of Solidworks from my sordid past as a race engineer, and I downloaded Autodesk's HSMXpress plugin for Solidworks as my CAM solution. Well to get that download, you have to give Autodesk contact info, and lo! Autodesk called me to offer me a Fusion 360 license. I wasn't particularly interested in switching ecosystems, but Fusion has 3D toolpaths where HSMXpress does not... so what the hell. And over the course of 4 years, I built up a pretty substantial library of parts and toolpaths, both lathe and mill. Got pretty good at Fusion CAM too.

Then earlier this month, the party ended. Autodesk changed the license functionality and all my parts got locked behind a paywall (yay for cloud services!). What could I do? I paid their ransom, bought a year of access, and discovered that a bunch of the good toolpath strategies (that I had been using pretty heavily) were themselves locked behind an even more extortionate paywall.

So I am now SUPER motivated to migrate off Fusion and never pay Autodesk a single red cent ever again.

Now as it turns out, there are programs that can get legit Solidworks and MasterCAM licenses for small-fish "hobbyist" scale guys like me. I'm now back on Solidworks, and I'm also licensed for MasterCAM 2022 and MasterCAM for Solidworks 2022. 

I'm now investigating how to migrate off Fusion by learning the differences in workflow. My expectation is that MC4SW will work very much like Fusion in the bigger scale (define part geometry in Solidworks, define a machine and stock setup in MC, select geometry and assign toolpaths to it, simulate to make sure nothing weird happens, then post out GCode) with devils of various sizes in the details.

My end state is my 3 machines fully defined (with simulation geometry), working post processors, and a migration plan mapped out that I can share with other Autodesk refugees - because I think there will be a lot more coming.

So let me ask y'all this - what advice do you have for me, before I start in? Assume a good familiarity with Solidworks and Fusion 360, and zero familiarity with either form of Mastercam.

I'd especially appreciate pointers to references where I can read up.

It seems like a lot of you are creating geometry directly in MasterCAM?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You shouldn't have any trouble. You will need post processor's for your machines, these are items you purchase or create. Asking for a Post Processor is not allowed.

What machines are you programing? When you say "simulate" do you mean verify G-Code or just verify in Mastercam? Actual G-Code verification is done by a 3rd party software like Vericut that requires a separate license.

There is tons of help here and on the main Mastercam forum.

Looks like you are from Canada going by your avatar so your reseller should be In-House, they are a good resource for help.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi RecceDG,

I assume you've obtained the hobbyist Mastercam deal being promoted through Titans of CNC. I'd recommend taking advantage of the free training out there to get up to speed. This is not only the Titans videos, but also the free courses on Mastercam University that offer a more extensive walkthrough of interface minutiae and different features. The Signature Parts Youtube series on the Mastercam channel is a good one to catch up on new/improved Mastercam practical features from the last few releases.

 

For the hobbyist offer, I believe you have access to generic posts, and you'd have to talk with your reseller or modify the generic posts yourself if you wanted to explore anything beyond that.

 

Don't forget that you can directly open Solidworks files in regular Mastercam- and any toolpaths or work you might have done in MCFSW will also come along for the ride.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
25 minutes ago, Chally72 said:

I assume you've obtained the hobbyist Mastercam deal being promoted through Titans of CNC. 

Yup, that's exactly it.

And that's what makes the reseller support angle... unclear. In-House Solutions was very good about getting me the install files, answering my license questions, and troubleshooting a CTD problem with MC4SW (turns out you can't have the SolidCAD add-in loaded at the same time) but now that I'm up and running, I'm not sure if I get access to "full" reseller support like fully paid seats do.

And that's fine. Not getting access to the full tech support functionality that fully paid seats do is an entirely reasonable tradeoff for the deep discount on price.

I'm prepared to learn how to do my own machine definitions and write my own postprocessors. Happily, GRBL and Mach 4 (the two control systems I use) are subsets of Fanuc, so posts shouldn't need much in the way of tweaking.

I have picked up that MasterCAM (the company) restricts postprocessor availability as a piracy deterrent. That's unlike the Fusion world, where postprocessors are widely shared. OK. New house, new rules.

I have geometry for my XCarve machine, and I spent some time in Solidworks simplifying the assembly (removing fasteners and whatnot) to reduce it to just the important bits for simulation, but even though I could merge that geometry into MC, I couldn't figure out how to select it to assign it in the machine definition. I could really use a reference on this.

When I say "simulate", I mean verification within MC, not GCode verification. The thing where you watch a virtual machine chew away your stock and make sure there's no crashes or weird motions or whatnot. 

I will check out the Titans stuff and the MasterCam University, thanks for that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Being honest, you're using a basic 2axis lathe and 3axis mill.

So std fanuc posts will be 97% there for you.

I wouldn't bother about learning machine simulation etc at this stage or spend any time in configuring it. Gently gently catchee monkey. One thing at a time. As the guys have said, the videos are fantastic learning for the basics all the way to the advanced.

And the archive help here via searching, is also massive.

And yeh, Autodesk....!

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Signed up for MasterCAM University, went through a couple of intro videos - this seems pretty good.

Titans appears to be much more Fusion focussed - maybe they will do more MC later?

Got halfway through the first machine sim video, enough to get the gist of it (and see how MC assigns geometry to axis). I'm going to continue to simplify my XCarve model in Solidworks, and once it's fully stripped down, bring it into MC and do the "assign axis geometry to levels" part and pick up the process from there.

I'm very split on videos as training material, because videos are sequential and play out in real time - can't speed-read a video! But there's no getting around that they answer my questions, so I'll find the time and do the program.

Thanks much for the help so far, even for a "hobby peasant" like myself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Titans site has Mastercam CAD and CAM lessons for all of the Building Blocks, Rocket series, and Art of Fixturing series. Additionally, the programming on their aerospace academy videos is Mastercam, though those videos focus more on machine and tooling process. The older 5 axis videos and such (content from 3 or more years ago) only have Fusion lessons.

 

For those who don't know, the Hobbyist deal is a $160 promotion that gets you a full-fledged seat of Mastercam for a year- Multiaxis, blade expert, etc etc- that can post code. The stipulation is that you only may use it if you make less than $1500 per year with your work. The licensing and files are marked as Educational files, with licensing for this program initially being for 1 year, and we hope to extend this in the future and continue it for coming years.

  • Thanks 1
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

This  is definetly a great deal, less than the price or maintenance on even entry level.

I remember buying my first seat of Mastercam, it was a tough decision to put down that kind of $$ on a hobbyist project.

And I had to do all the rotations with wcs in top plane.. 

A clever move to undercut the competitors without devaluing existing customer investements, I wish they had done this sooner!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't know if all y'all pros know this, but there has been a HUGE explosion in consumer-level CNC in the past couple of years. Mostly 3-axis gantry routers like XCarve, Shapeoko, 3018 etc but also lots of user-converted small lathes and mills. You can get an Arduino shield that runs GCode (GRBL) or OTS components like the Ethernet SmoothStepper and Mach 4, slap on some stepper motors, and go to town.

Most machine vendors have their own design software, but it universally sucks, so the next level up for a hobby CNC guy is something that generates GCode.

Autodesk went after this market HARD with Fusion 360, reaching out to individual users (like me) or through tie-ins with popular YouTubers like NYCNC and AvE. They got a lot out of it too, utilizing their user community as product testers (Fusion got WAY better from when I first touched it in 2017 to today, boy howdy, thanks to huge user uptake and all the bug reports and diagnostics). You go to any general-purpose social media site that has a hobby CNC corner on it (like Reddit) and Fusion has *enormous* mindshare because of this.

But Autodesk gonna Autodesk, and now that Fusion is more ready for primetime and the pro market, they have started squeezing them that got them there - and I'm one of "them". So there is a growing movement/realization amongst people like me that cloud computing CAD/CAM is super vulnerable to the corporate whims of those in charge and that features and access can and WILL be pulled at any moment - and they want an alternative.

I'm lucky, in that I came to CAD/CAM by way of the pro side from my job in my former life. I used Solidworks daily, and I used Mastercam (by association) through my partner machinist. So I knew Mastercam existed, and I had a rough idea of what it did and how it did it. So I came looking for Mastercam, fully expecting that it would be priced as far out of my price range as a full seat of Solidworks. The Titans of CNC promotion was a welcome surprise, and here I am.

It is now possible to get a full version of Solidworks Educational (fully functional except for a watermark in your drawings - all the add-ins are there) for $50/year. And with the Titans Mastercam promotion, that's CAD/CAM for just over $200 - or 1/3rd what Fusion 360 now costs *without* the good 3D toolpaths (that's another grand).

The limit is the "make no more than $1500/year" stipulation, but that's easy enough to meet. (Although lots of hobby guys think they are going to get rich cutting "Live, Laugh, Love" plaques and then discover there's 10 other guys in their neighborhood trying the same thing)

There is a real place for a hobby version of Solidworks and Mastercam, priced at hobby levels (which starts to get picky at the $200 price point and is running away at $500), and it's a good investment because that's basically mindshare and training in your ecosystem. If it becomes possible for a hobby guy to get Mastercam for his hobby machine at hobby prices - that's training for if/when he becomes a pro operator. Wouldn't it be great for pros to have access to a pool of potential employees already trained up? A rising tide floats all boats.

It worked super well for Autodesk, turning Fusion from a joke to an actual player.

The trick of course is differentiating the hobby version from the pro version. One COA is to restrict features, and to a degree, I'd be OK with that. So long as I get access to all the cool HSM 3D toolpaths that the big boys do (I want to speed up my operations as badly as anyone) I don't need 5 axis (or more) on a mill, or secondary turrets or live tooling on a lathe. There are no hobby mill-turns (yet...) But I kinda think this is the wrong path, because of the training/familiarity aspect.

The other COA is to restrict support, and that makes perfect sense. I do not need an answer in 30 minutes. I have no expectation of getting a service call (although to be honest, the developer of the plugin for Mach 4 that controls my Ethernet Smoothstepper has remoted into my machine to diagnose a bug we saw on my lathe, so even that isn't fully off the table) but I get that I'm going to be way down the support priority list compared to a pro seat and that's fine. TANSTAAFL.

But however it happens, I'm glad to have this option. I'm happy to pay for what I get, so long as the price remains reasonable and the functionality remains.

I'd be even happier if it was a perpetual license - by which I mean, I buy MC2022, I get any updates to 2022 for free, and it never stops working, but if I want 2023, I have to pony up again (Magix uses this model for Vegas Pro, the movie editing software). I also wish I could use MC on multiple computers (although not simultaneously) because I have a computer at each machine, controlling it, and the one really useful feature of Fusion being cloud-based was that I could bring Fusion up at the machine to tweak geometry and toolpaths. Solidworks lets me do this, MC does not without first deactivating it on one machine then reactivating it on another (which I am hesitant to try, because I really don't want to somehow screw it up and have *nothing* work). I also would like an upgrade path on a continuum between "<$1500/year sales" and "full-bore seat" in case the "Live Laugh Love" plaques take off, with some sort of sliding scale of support to go along with the sliding scale of price.

But at the moment, I'm glad to have what I have, I'm cool with the limits imposed on me, and I'm super keen to see it help more people migrate off of Fusion. I would very much like to be part of the conversation about what the hobby market means to Mastercam - And I think there's a real opportunity here for the company.   

Aside ends - back to learning.

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites
7 minutes ago, gcode said:

An interesting topic.. thanks for posting

Yes indeed and funny how many thought we were crazy saying it was going to head this way, but here it is like many of us predicated it would be.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Bait and hook at it best. Free is never free and yes you always get what you pay for.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting indeed. I have a small shop with MC lathe and mill licenses.  The parts I make don't require surfacing / 5 axis paths etc. so I never considered ponying up the money for those licences since I'd never see a return on investment.  Sounds like I can buy this hobby version and play with 5x and blade expert for fun as long as I don't sell any of those products...pretty cool.  I'm sure plenty will abuse this but plenty already do.   

Link to comment
Share on other sites
4 hours ago, metalmansteve said:

 Sounds like I can buy this hobby version and play with 5x and blade expert for fun as long as I don't sell any of those products...pretty cool.  I'm sure plenty will abuse this but plenty already do.   

Mastercam 2022 includes the Home Learning Addition in the same install and the HLE includes all the options, including Blade Expert and Port Expert.

They are still tweaking licensing issues, but once they are done we will be able to play with Blade Expert and Port Expert for free. 

Of course there is no posting with HLE, but I am looking forward to playing with both.

 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Another point that some may not be aware of- Subscription pricing for Mastercam is also now currently available. This falls in between the hobbyist version and a perpetual license, but obviously the pricing skews more towards the higher of those two. Last I checked, subscription was aiming to roll out quarterly increments for pricing structure.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Correct. Each reseller is individually handling the requests and determining eligibility. For those reading this who do end up contacting a reseller about the deal, please be patient as there's been an influx of requests after the recent Titans of CNC Boombastic event, and by the time they're done processing your request, for a $160 package they're not making a dime on it for their time.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 1 month later...

So an update:

Like all things, life gets in the way. Notwithstanding my background, I am a home gamer;  I can't necessarily shut my life down for a week (or more!) while I concentrate exclusively on learning a new software package (especially one that isn't my day job).

But as luck would have it, a project came up. I'm making a new leadscrew for the cross-slide on my lathe. In order to get leadscrew-quality threads, I'm sending it out to be threadrolled, and the threadroller has specific requirements that must be met. One of those is a 30 degree bevel off the backside of the threaded portion, then the shaft flares out to form a bearing retention shoulder - and because my former racing engineering life taught me to "radius all the things" to prevent stress raisers, that transition is radiused.

Lathe work is generally so simple that most of my stuff I do in MDI mode, but when profiles get more complicated, I go to CAM. I did a couple of parts like this in Fusion, so I know how to make Fusion lathe toolpaths and I have a workable Fusion lathe workflow.

In this case, I MDI-ed the main threaded section (where I had to hold +0.0, -0.0015") and now I want to generate toolpaths to hollow out that back chamfer, a little straight section, and the radius up to the bearing shoulder.

I had originally drawn the part in SW as a series of stacked extrudes, but my spidey sense went off, and I re-did it as a single revolved sketch with the axis of revolution lying along SW's native Z axis. Unfortunately, I didn't notice that I had positive Z in the wrong direction - but more on that later.

Then I had to do a machine definition. Some of this was pretty straightforward, some of this was unbelievably obscure (holy hell changing a machine to be inch, not metric is SUPER counterintuitive and much Google-fu was required) but eventually I wound up with an inch lathe machine with a left-side spindle and a lower left "turret" (my machine is a converted bench lathe, not a slant-bed) with the axis seemingly properly aligned. No physical model, just the definition.

Then I defined tool 3 in my tool library - started doing it by hand, then I discovered where the standard tools lived and just pulled up the right one.

Stock setup was straightforward enough, but I could not get the chuck to show up on the right end (WARNING!) .

Started adding toolpaths. Some weirdness with defining the home position (why does it want a negative value of X to put the tool on the near side of the workpiece?) but I eventually got three created: a roughing path that replicated the MDI work I had already done (to get rid of stock crash warnings), a roughing path to hollow out the profile, and a finishing path that traced out the final profile. Toolpaths looked good and I could see in the backplot that radius compensation on the insert was working.

So at this point I'm a few hours in, and I'm feeling pretty good. Not as intuitive as Fusion in some places (give the devil his due, HSMworks is pretty slick - but in some cases, I suspect Fusion/HSMworks may have copied MC) but I've got toolpaths that look reasonable for what I want to do.

So I tried posting.

My lathe is controlled by Mach 4, which is a FANUC (ish) clone. I'm using the generic FANUC post, and I'm fully prepared for weirdness here. Part of my Things to Do plan involves going through the postprocessor and disabling features that Mach 4 doesn't support or otherwise tweaking, and that wasn't on the agenda yet. Posting at this point was more to see what MC4SW would generate as code - and lathe programs are usually really short, which means that hand-editing them as a workaround until the postprocessor is sorted isn't a crazy idea. At this point, I'm not planning on running this code, I'm curious about if code will be generated at all.

The program comes up... and yeah, there's a couple of weird things in the preamble that will need investigation, but I can see the actual passes and they look good and... hey, why are the Z values all positive? Z0 is the rightmost face of the part; everything Z should be negative....

Oh crap - the Z arrow on the gnomon is facing the wrong way.

This resulted in a couple of hours banging my head trying to figure out how to flip the Z axis - made more difficult by the "Plane Manager" having moved out of the ribbon (as it is in the videos I found) into the side pane... and even then, NOTHING I could do would move the WCS. Plane manager, new plane, select part end face, click the '=" button to select it as the WCS, fully expect to see the gnomon jump... NOPE. NOTHING worked. I eventually went back to the original SW sketch, mirrored it, and set the rightmost end of the axis of revolution to be coincident with the SW origin, and THAT worked... but that feels like a hack. There has to be a way to assign WCS independent of the part's native axis orientation (otherwise how do you do a second setup where the part is flipped in the chuck? - this is one area where Fusion kicks xxxx in the UI department)

And of course, after changing the native geometry, I had to go back and re-assign the geometry chains and flip the handedness of the toolholder and the stock - and now the chuck is on the correct side - but pointed the wrong way? (something to investigate) but I have reasonable-looking toolpaths again.

So, progress.    

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A very simple way that I use to make a Lathe plane without having to think too much is the Align to Z command you get in the lathe ribbon:

739614727_LathePlane.thumb.jpg.c48ea5bbd3dc53e33ffda120d2ed5720.jpg

 

You can either transform the part to an existing plane, or let it create a new plane and keep the model in the same orientation as it was imported. I always use the latter. This takes most all of the pain out of setting up lathe planes that newer users can experience. Even I get confused by lathe planes still.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

OK, since I have your attention. :)

Attached is a quick sketch of my lathe setup and how I (and Mach 4) see the layout once everything is correctly set, just so we have a frame of reference for the discussion.

Assume that I drew the part in Solidworks (I'm using Mastercam for Solidworks as my workspace, not standalone). Assume that I drew the part in the orientation of the gnomon in the upper left of the sketch - and for giggles, let's assume that that gnomon is also the Solidworks origin for the part (ie I haven't used the hack I described above) so I have to move the WCS to where it is on the sketch. Do I select the rightmost part face and hit "Align to Z" and that does it? 

Now what if I want to do a second setup where I flip the part in the chuck. Select the leftmost face, "Align to Z" and maybe transform?

I'm trying to wrap my head around this whole planes thing. In my head, the lathe plane is fixed and the part axis flips around. I kinda want to be able, for each setup, to define which way part Z points, and then Mastercam aligns that Z direction with the fixed lathe Z direction (which is how Fusion works).

This is as much a terminology/UI problem as anything else; I have to learn to speak Mastercam.

lathe.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There is a flip button in the Align To Z panel where you can flip the Z direction. When you click on a cylinder or surface, it'll place the gnomon at one axial end of the solid you clicked. You can always click on the Z arrow of the gnomon it places and simply drag it/snap it to a new Z origin if you didn't want your origin to land there. To make my Setup 1 and (Flipped) setup 2, I just use the Align to Z command twice to create my two planes I will use, and for the second I'll make sure my Z direction is flipped and dragged to the opposite extent of the part.

I almost never move the model, as it prevents you from, say, importing a new rev model quickly and cleanly. I'm always creating planes in different orientations as described above with Align to Z.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.

Join us!

eMastercam - your online source for all things Mastercam.

Together, we are the strongest Mastercam community on the web with over 56,000 members, and our online store offers a wide selection of training materials for all applications and skill levels.

Follow us

×
×
  • Create New...