Hi, I am looking for a top notch Mastercam programmer who can help out part time on a tooling project. The job will be revolving around generating a proper toolpath from IGES CAD files in Mastercam. Working closely with an experienced machinist who needs help on the Mastercam side.You must posses an in and out, blindfold knowledge of Mastercam. It is preferable if you live in the Burbank Glendale area and can work on-site, however remote work will be considered too. please email resume to [email protected]

Iskander, thank you for your detailed answer. I am just beginning to get the idea of how powerful Mastercam is. it's quite mind boggling. I have been comfortable modeling fast in some of the most popular animation packages, and in particular I like the ability to use animation to simulate the motion of moving parts. (my current mold has quite a few) the bottom line I am hoping to use Mastercam for CAM but don't feel the immediate need to use it for CAD. I want to emphasize also, this is a whole new thing for me and I am building this experimental mold mostly so I can get some learning experience. the most important thing for me on this project is to be able and understand and hopefully create the most effective work flow process between me and the toolmaker. my toolmaker have been using Mastercam (I think version 7) for 2 years or so. He has been taking some classes too. He can do simple stuff but is having a more difficult time with programming for more complex 3d surfaces. I believe he likes to 'analyze' in order to re-measure everything. I will check on that with him. Here are some questions I have - Is there an easy or automatic way to extract all contour curves from the all surfaces in Mastercam? Do you convert to solids for the purpose of rapid prototyping? Is it safe to assume that Mastercam should be able to handle and generate automatically the proper toolpath for just about any complex 3d surface? What good documentation is out there? haggai p.s by the way, atta israeli? atta medaber ivrit?

Wow, you guys are so helpful! thanks for everyone who is helping here. ok, what I am trying to do in this test is simplify the work for my tool maker as much as possible. Indeed He is a very experienced tool maker (30 years or so) but not so much experience with Mastercam. My experience is 10+ years in 3d software but never Mastercam until a few days ago. Indeed, I have used Maya to export to iges, not having any other exporting tools on my linux workstation. Like Iskander guessed I am trying to get curves from surfaces, but I did not realize there is a way in Mastercam to get the curves from the surfaces? Is there such way? from your answer I am guessing that it's possible to extract curves. It would be great if you can tell me how. Originally the tool maker was trying to 'analyze' from the surfaces but was unable to get any reading. so I tryed to send him a simplified file which contain curves which I extracted from the surfaces in my 3d software. my guess is the it will be best if I can do the 2 things. i.e: 1. a. extract curves from surfaces b. convert to iges c. convert iges curves file to Mastercam d. convert nurb splines to lines & arcs so they can be analyzed 2. a. convert surfaces to iges b. convert iges surfaces file to Mastercam c. extract curves from surfaces (if possible) so they can be analyzed. anything you can tell me on these 2 proesses will be great, thanks, haggai

PDG, ok, I am understing this a little better now, but. please excuse my ignorance in Mastercam - I believe to be able and use 'analyze' they have to be lines or arcs, not NURB splines, right? How will Create/Spline/Automatic will help? What would be the reason to ever converting lines to splines? haggai

ok, here it is - I am trying to make a little more cost effective by trying to reduce the amount of time my tool maker has to spend in Mastercam. If possible he would be able to open up and file that will give him all the information he needs. nothing more nothing less. Thers are just too many splines out there and it could translate to weeks of works. (and tons of money) If he will have to create new splines to get arcs it's a disadvantage... haggai

Bernie, didn't know about screen - statistics Is there a special settings for iges importing? what does it means "mask on"? haggai

Yes, the splines are visible. I have tried since my first posting to use the conv-to-arc command, and that worked ok. Still I was hoping that there will be some automatic way to convert all the nurb splines to arcs and lines rather than having to do it manually. Also it seems that in some cases an arced nurb spline will be broken up to many sub sections arcs when openning in Mastercam. I will send you a sample iges file which will contain 2 circles each made of 4 sections. haggai

Hi, When converting 3rd degree nurb curves brought in from an iges file to Mastercam, it seems that the analyze command won't work? Is Mastercam using different data types to represent curves? any suggestion? Can you help? thanks, haggai (sorry. this is my first time with Mastercam, Just trying to help my tool maker who is having hard time dealing with my files which were created using A|W.