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.

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.

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?

Hello all. I'm a refugee from Fusion 360 looking to change over to a Solidworks/MasterCAM toolchain. It appears that I have to build machine definitions for my XCarve and my home-brew CNC lathe based on Mach 4. Is there a resource that teaches how to do this? I kinda have the gist of it, but it would be good to have a manual or other guide so it's not just monkey bashing on keyboard. The intent is to release a full XCarve/GRBL machine definition and post processor once I have it right. Thanks.

Me too please.