Personally I couldn't work without it, but I suppose if you wanted to you could also make things all different colors and or use the masking to select what you wanted.. being colorblind that wouldn't be a great option for me, and even if I could do it that way I would still use levels.

I believe it is pretty obvious that the new verify is an order of magnitude better for anyone doing large complex parts. I could be wrong, but I also believe that the majority of Mastercam users are doing smaller less complex parts utilizing 2D and 3D toolpaths but without hitting the level required to 'break' the old verify. In my opinion people that had a totally broken verify before would be very unlikely to be upset with just about anything CNC Software put out this time around, since before it was utterly broken, and now it is at least functional. All that said, for the people for whom it worked fine before, it is no surprise that they feel let down by something that takes longer to run and gives less quality results. Either way, I am using the new verify and have been since X7, but I think its worth noting that the rest of the programmers that I work with (an many others I know as well) haven't been willing to upgrade since X5 since so far as they are concerned that's the last 'stable' version that had the 'good' verify. I can't help but think this attitude cannot be good for the Mastercam community, so I hope CNC Software does their best to make this new verify as robust for all users as the old verify was for most users in the past.

If anyone has settings for that file that seem to work as good as the original verify I would sure love to see them, I messed with that file a lot in X7 to try and get verify as best as I could but I haven't played with it in 8 yet.. would be curious to know what people have come up with for the optimum balance of performance/accuracy.. And as a side note I will say that they must have tweaked those setting a lot already before X8 came out or else done something else, or both .. since I have had much better performance with verify in X8 than in X7

Who knows .. perhaps they will get them done by X10.. you never know..

I kind of wish no one had asked, but they did so here is my opinion, this isn't meant to trash Mastercam or CNC Software its just my opinion based on the last couple years of using it since X7 came out and now since X8 has been out. I think the features in the new verify are a great improvement over the features in the old verify, however there is simply no doubt in my mind that the new verify has caused the times to program and verify parts inside of Mastercam to go up. I realize that for people with large complex parts the old verify would simply give up the ghost and in those cases it was useless. That said the new verify must be orders of magnitude better for anyone who was in that situation. For programmers such as myself, that wasn't much of a problem, I can only remember happening on one part (and yes it totally sucked and pissed me off). For all other times however the old verify gave me the ability to verify parts quickly and accurately, which is exactly what I needed verify to do. Using a car analogy here, my thoughts are that if the people at CNC Software had really wanted to make the new verify shine, they should have spent more time on the drivetrain of the thing, and less time on the bells and whistles. So far as I recall I never saw any posts begging for most of the new features in the new verify, and though most of them are indeed nice and are handy, if we are to be brutally honest the real functionality of verify in many cases is slower and with less detail than the old one. Yes we can accurate zoom, yes it is functional enough to work, but seriously its like looking at minecraft on the new verify and call of duty on the old one.. on top of this if you turn the graphics up to get a better result (and I have a very high end computer and video card with 32GB of RAM and 4GB of video RAM) then the computer stalls .. So I guess my opinion on the new verify all in all is.. barely acceptable, Mastercam should focus more on the reasons people use verify, simply put not everyone has vericut, most shops feel they should be able to rely on verify within Mastercam and you can add all the bells and whistles you want so it looks great at a trade show but when it takes programmers more time to program jobs in the real world they will continue to get complaints as simply put more time to program jobs means less profit.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but though Curve Slice is nice, it doesn't necessarily give a turn profile, as an example, think of a yoke (a y shaped part) lets say you needed to turn the part prior to milling ops.. Curve slice returns a profile with the same outline as the original yoke, however if you were to turn using it you wouldn't end up with enough stock to finish the part since curve slice simply gives a 2D slice of the object, if you have a part your going to turn you need to actually spin it in order to guarantee a proper profile for turning hence the need for spin in silhouette boundary and in turn profile.

Yeah, its a great tool, its essentially the same as using silhouette boundary with spin enabled, If I remember correctly I first saw it in one of those 'what's new' classes when X6 came out.. glad I could help

I believe spine fit creates splines and arc fit attempts to create arcs where possible, I guess what is best is up to you to a degree, having them be arcs will let you analyze them to get more information from them, but as you said you might end up with a ton of small arcs which can make the geometry rather cumbersome to work with. Im not sure about the accuracy, but I believe what the accuracy actually changes is how Mastercam computes the endpoints of the arcs when creating the boundary, more tolerance allows more error on the endpoints which can allow the geometry to be simplified and therefore use less arcs. Another option which is made specifically for a turning profile is to use Create -> Turn Profile from the menu .. I have used both, but it seems like turn profile tends to give me less hassles with the geometry it creates.

I haven't run Hurco's but in general .. when you use wear comp you are putting a value in the offset register which is specifying the amount of 'wear' on the tool edge, if you are using control comp you are telling the control the diameter of the tool that is being used. Essentially the difference between the two is that with control compensation the control knows the actual size of the tool and the path that is programmed is the actual part geometry you want cut, the control then uses the known tool diameter to compensate the tool path the cutter follows in order to have the cutting edge follow the geometry that was programmed. With wear compensation the cutter diameter is unknown to the control, but is programmed for at the computer, the path that is programmed is the path the centerline of a cutter of a specified diameter, the only compensation in the control is based on wear on the tool. With control compensation, the control essentially "knows" the diameter of the tool and also "knows" the geometry, this is why you cannot put a tool that is .130 diameter into a .0625 corner radius using control comp, the control does the math and determines that the tool cannot fit into the programmed geometry and produces an error on the control. With wear comp the control only knows the centerline of the tool and is more than willing to drive the .130 dia tool through a .062 radius corner because it doesn't know or care about the .062 radius it only knows about that path it was programmed to at the cutter centerline. In order to determine what the setup/operator needs to input at the machine, you need to know which type of comp was programmed in mastercam, it sounds like on your older machines the machines were programmed using control compensation, I would think the easiest way to find out if you could do that on the new ones would be to program a part using control comp and then cut a test part..

I wanted to thank everyone for their input, glad to know there is a workaround, its kind of sad that this has been a known bug for so long but either way at least I can keep moving forward on what I need to work on and perhaps not end up pulling all my hair out..

Yes.. activate solid selection with the ICON shown above.. then also.. you probably want to de-activate the icon/button for BODY.. so you are left with only the Icon/button for FACE highlighted.. or else you will end up with the edges of the entire solid..

I don't do EDM work so im not positive, but I would imagine you could, since you can choose edges of solids to make toolpaths from in Mill..

I have run into an issue and I am not sure if it is a bug or what.. I do know its driving me nuts.. I have a part I programmed in the past in X7 which is very similar to a new part that I now need to do in X8.. Since the parts are so similar I imported my operations from my X7 file and figured on simply reselecting the requisite geometry for each toolpath working my way through them. This is where I ran into weirdness.. Once I selected the geometry for my first operation I made sure only that operation was selected and hit Regenerate All Selected Operations.. Now I get popups for virtually every toolpath saying there is no geometry for this op for like every operation even though only one op was selected.. \ Held Enter to get through the 100 or so boxes that popped up.. figured I hit regen all by accident so hit the regen selected again.. same deal.. So my question is, is this a bug, or possibly just some weirdness on my end.. has anyone else had this happen when trying to use regen selected ops? If anyone has run into this before is there any workaround? I can hold enter but I can't even begin to express how annoying this is getting.. I mean I suppose I could simply pull in one path at a time but all that browsing for the proper file to import from gets tedious ..

From the Menu use - Create - Curve One Edge, or Create - Curve All Edges - these both work on solids One Edge will do only one edge, whereas All Edges will do all the edges of what you currently have selected, ie all edges of one or multiple faces, or all edges of the entire solid.. I cannot attest to whether or not this works if you don't have a license for solids, but it definitely does work if you have the solids option.

Good thing you had a wide angle lens handy to take a pic of that one.. that much extension is bordering on ridiculous .. but you gotta do what you gotta do..

I don't know if there is another way or not, but the way I get around that situation is to draw the tool as a custom tool.

Disregard.. totally misread the original post .. lol

For the icons, right click in the toolbar area (not over an icon) and choose customize from the right click menu. Then in the dialog window that comes up choose the options tab and check the box that says Large Icons.. makes the icons a much more reasonable size. As for the pan instead of rotate that is a config setting.. Settings Menu -> Configuration -> Screen page .. then change the setting for Middle mouse button from Pan to Spin.

Where I am working its basically what Ron said.. cross your fingers and hope its not an issue when your finishing.. if it is then its an insurance claim.. I am interested to hear if anyone has come up with a better solution..

Zip the file into a zip archive before uploading.. or else use a zip2go.. Zip files will attach to the board successfully

I prefer the easiest solution, I would use 2D Contour and Multi Passes .. then just do the one line in the corner.. make multiple passes to step over till you get there, and in entry/exit params you can extend length by 75% tool diameter to make sure you start and finish off the work.. IMO the Facing toolpath is going to keep giving you headaches in this situation.

I would suggest looking at the files using a Hex Editor (an editor that lets you view the hexadecimal codes hiding in the blank space in a file) Essentially within the file there are different codes for things like tabs, spaces and line endings.. my guess is that the brothers probably have a different character or set of characters for line endings and that is what keeps a new file from working when an old one does. The line endings thing I have seen before when one software uses UNIX system based line endings and one system uses Windows based line endings.. There also might be codes in the beginning of the file that don't display but that have a purpose for the communication to work.

I don't have much in the way of suggestions on this but, is it possible that it has a file extension that windows isn't showing you.. Make sure to check inside windows so that it shows you file extensions.. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hide-file-name-extensions#show-hide-file-name-extensions=windows-7

Its definitely possible to do it, just not with a simple xform -> project to create the geometry.. I think you would have better luck if you were to xform project from at least three different sides of the part and fudge the lines together.. once you have the geometry it should be easier. I will give this a shot and see how it works out..

Excellent, thanks for the information..