This has been a long time in the pipeline.

[Gracjan aka Pullo]

Mastercam 2018 has finally bidirectional solid highliting. It's not perfect , but it will do. Until now selecting a solid from the Solids manager gave you absolutely no clue as to what you're

dealing with in the graphical window. The only way until now was to change the color of the solid thru' the attributes and then you could fish it out by color filtering. Well if you now (2018)

select the solid, it does not light up, but if you select any of it's subfeatures , they will light up in the selection color!  And all of a sudden Auto Highlight has become meanigful ! It now turns this highliting on and off. 

For those who try to get everything done in one environment (design and machining), there is still the problem of figuring out which wireframe is responsible for creating a certain solid.

Right now you have to select the chain in the solid Chains window , which will light it up (select it) and then you can separate it from the rest of the geometry thru Alt-E (Hide)

 David Colin said he'd look if this could be done by a NetHook. He's done this with machining wireframe geometry.

Gracjan

 

[Brian Pallas]

That is good.  

 

In X7 at least, if you have the solids tree visible, click on the solid in MCAM, then hit "f4", or "Entity Properties" under the "Analyze" menu, that solid in the tree will be highlighted.

 

As far as wireframes - Sounds like you have all your geometry on one level?  Each part in an assembly I put the wireframe for that part on it's own level (and I make each part a different color as I'm going),  then the solid for it on a level that is 5 higher.  And label each level.  And use "Level sets" to turn all solids for a design on or off.  

For a part with a lot of stuff going on I would put the wireframe geometry for each feature, or group of features on a level.  

I remember when I was learning CAD/CAM in the mold making class at the Community College one of the first things the teacher had me do was take a mold base CAD file, where everything was on one level and go through and put it on different levels and label it.  Which taught me 1.Organizing my files and 2. What the parts of a mold base were, because I had to figure out what it was to label it

And probably a personal preference of mine, but I will have the fixture design, prints, and part machining program in one file.  Then I will "save some" and save the fixture part I need to machine and use a different file for machining the fixture parts.  That helped me keep everything simple and easy to find.  I had too much stuff going on with everything in one file.  

When I go to machine a fixture part, I will remove the operation history of the solid.  And then you can usually get most of the geometry needed for machining from the geometry that was used to make the solid, but you can change the geometry if needed for machining, without messing up the solid.  Plus, for the way I am using it, you would want any design changes done in the design file.

[gms1]

I do all my fixture design in mastercam as well and I always separate each item in assembly by level. I would have 0 hair if I had these massive assemblies and fixtures on 1 single level.

[Gracjan aka Pullo]

Thank you for the feedback .  This is the thing that I have always prided myself that I can get things designed without having to be pedantic about my geometry. I only use color to differentiate the geometry. Using levels for me is like a red flag to a  bull (a myth according to Mythbusters).

It seems now that the hihglihting in 2018 works the same way as in 2017, if you select the name of the solid in the solids manager , nothing happens, but touch any of it's subfeatures and they light up, so my info was a dud here....