Guys this release will work with our without MU1. Since a lot of what we do it outside of Mastercam it has no bearing on which you use. We heard it would be soon and we may have jumped the gun a little, but we wanted everyone to have the cool new stuff we offer. I am really digging the WCS display it is great when training and doing demonstrations.

nope you just install and all will be good.

Have you tried on Win7 to run the compatibility mode as administrator. Some people right click on the icon and say run as administrator and that is not the same as right click properties then compatibility tab then check the run as administrator check box. For XP have you tied erasing the mcam.config file and mastercam.mtb and mastercam.kmp file and reopen and see if the alt-s works again. Sometimes there get strange things going on and erasing them and letting Mastercam rewrite them helps. HTH

Hello from Anaheim Ca. this week. Next week I am in Houston.

Chris you still seeing the 30 day code window? If so look for a verisurf.acc file in the folder Mastercam is installed and rename it and then try it again and see if you still have that same problem. It should only be for the reverse and not for the rest of the free tools.

Rick sorry that is hard coded to do that.

Chris, that should not be the case can you send me a link to the download you used so I can research what might be causing it? Thanks.

The reverse is all that is asking for the code. The rest of it should work fine with no problem. If anything happens just let us know and we will get it taken care of.

Tec-Ease is a good place to look. www.tec-ease.com HTH

Reverse is our full reverse package free for 30 days to try out. So much it can do hard to go over it in just one response. Do a search on this user account and will see some of what I have put up. Lets just say it gives Mastercam so very nice tools for Meshing and handling point clouds for creating free form surfaces. Pierce is a function where you need to create an intersecting point between 2 feature, these feature would be a line, or cylinder to a surface some distance away. So if you had a compound hole and you want to know where the center point on it was to a surface away from it you would want a pierce point and that is where this tool comes in handy.

It might be a Windows 7 quirk. On the X4 or X5 icon in windows 7 right click and go to properties. Then look for the compatibility tab. Then at the bottom is a run as administrator check box. Check it and then try running Mastercam, now if your permission are not turned all the way down ni Windows 7 every time you start Mastercam it will give you a warning. Then it should work. Now you can try registering the .dll through control control panel applet, but the problem is finding the correct .dll to register. HTH

Does anyone know how to make a icon point to specific config file when clicked on? Trevor how do I get to the Beta Forum?

We work with many different devices and would need some more specific information about your device. When you say demo they took one of your parts and reversed it or they took one of their parts and revered it? Rapid form is good software and we are good software comes down to what you are looking to do and get out of the software. We do work inside of Mastercam and can reverse engineer creating solids in many different ways. Comes down to what you are looking to do and how you want to get there. If you want to measure parts, see quality of the parts and then have something inside of one software for the reversing, machining and then checking of that part Verisurf on top of Mastercam is the answer. Shot me an email and I will be glad to have one of our RSM get in touch with you and go over setting up a demo and showing what Verisurf can do.

Okay I think some of the discussion has to be the size of the parts you are looking to scan? What is the accuracy of the items you are looking to scan has been mentioned, but when you start getting over a certain size then different things have to be considered. Now take faro arm and scanner with a 7 axis arm which is a requirement you are starting ot talk about some serious bucks. Take a cheaper less accurate arm and you can lower the cost, but then you lose the accuracy. So it comes down to the ROI. We have customers that have grown their business 200% with the investment on this capability because they went with the right equipment for the work they were looking to do. We have seen other customer cheap out and get something that did not live up to what they expected and lost business. All scanning to me comes down to educations and knowing the process and what are manageable expectations to keep everything in front of you. I see so many think they are going ot take a 1-2-3 block and scan it and get .0001 accuracy and in 5 seconds have a perfect model and done. Believe me a lot companies sell it that way. When in reality their devices they sit on have a certain amount of tolerance and then you put the scanner on it and that error get compounded. That 1-2-3 block would be better to be hard probed and made into planes that are then turned into cad and .0002 to .0005 would be what I would expect on accuracy using some of the best devices on the market. Now the a scanner where some then scans that 1-2-3 block everything to scan in had to be line of sight for scanner. So if the scanner can not see it on the first try now you have to realign the device to the part throwing other error into the equation. We will ignore all of that and just take a point cloud from the device and go by you have a 2 million point point cloud for a 1-2-3 block. Now why would this even be needed. Well it is not. If 4 points defined the plane and you fit a plane among 4 points that represented a plane is 4 point going to make any difference to 400,000? No but again all on how it is presented. You think you need millions of points then you are going to demand millions of points because everyone tells you their scanner can scan 60k points a second. Okay again how accurate are those points back to what is being scanned back to the device that is doing the scanning back to they way it was calibrated back to other factors. Now again you get this cloud and that accuracy of the device comes in and the faces all show .001/.005 fluctuations when you then turn that into a mesh, because again everyone keep telling you that this is the best way. So you go down the mesh(STL) path because everyone keep pushing that method. Again it is a 1-2-3 block I could have taken 3 micrometers and told you everything in the time took to type this one sentence. So what is the advantage well the advantage is when you have some really non prismatic part that has no model no prints and you are not worried about holding that .0001 tolerance. You got a .005 or .03 tolerance on all the crazy stuff and have a .001 on all the tight stuff then a combo device arm/scanner is the ideal way. Here is why. The arm can make clouds and not worry about the added problem of loser tolerance by adding the scanner and you can still create the clouds needs to turn into mesh. Then use the scanner on all the lose stuff quickly. Then if the part has prismatic shapes now you hard probe everything you can with the device and you do the work in 40% to 70% of the only use a scanner method. You get more controllable results and manageable results and the accuracy you need is where you need it and the get it done where you need it done. I think everyone knows where I work if not check us out we can do it all and even allow you to align, measure, and inspect to the mesh(STL). We also give you all the reversing tools needs for the above task while the whole time allowing you to work inside of the Mastercam tool path. This is a duct for an airplane that was scanned with a tracker. The part is 90" x 72.5" x 47.5" This mesh(STL) has 61,280 faces. With one of our reversing tools I can turn this into one surface. That is just a little of what software adds to the equation. If you have any questions or comments I welcome them and will do my best to answer or help in ant way I can.

Well to all of the Texas users I will be at the Events next week for MLC CAD. See any of you that are going there. I will be doing some presentations about the Master3DGage if you have any interest or just want to meet come on by. Here is a list with addresses. 1) Tuesday January 18, 2011 – Dallas, TX 12noon-3pm Iscar Metals, Inc (Arlington) 300 Westway Place Arlington Texas 76018 for directions pH: (817) 258-3200 2) Wednesday January 19, 2011 – Austin TX 12noon-3pm Haas Technical Center - near Cabela's 375 Commercial Drive Buda, TX 78610 for directions pH: (512) 312-1120 3) Thursday January 20, 2011 – Houston, TX 12noon-3pm Okuma Technical Center - Hartwig 4727 South Pinemont, Suite 200 Houston TX 77041 for directions pH: (713) 749-9600

Chris yes it does filter STL. Care to send me a sample file to see if it does what you are looking for? Mastercam does a good job when using a higher tolerance and the files become more manageable. .001 tolerance is going to make a huge file where as a .01 or .03 will help file size and mote times be accurate enough.

It goes by the intersection of the surface and the cylinder representing the hole in the surface model. If it is to close of a pick to one surface then it will use that closest surface as where to place the point, line, and circle if all of those options are picked. When it doubt I use upper and lower on the line to make sure I have something to use for a toolpath. HTH

I guess it comes down to wanting to work in one software and learn everything there is about one software. Also I did not say you couldn't make it one surface again tons of tools inside of Verisurf for reversing this is only scratching the surface with the example I gave here. Have a good one off to church.

Sorry I was out of town for the last couple days. Sapiem what we see here is a quick and easy way to take collected data and make some surfaces out of it. Again there are many tools inside of the software that allow many ways to create surfaces. What I showed here is a method that allows very little work on the users part. Also if you looked at the toolpaths in Mastercam this becomes a non-factor. Now if we used the STL method in Mastercam for drive to machine with a dummy surface to control the vector of the toolpath or a chain to drive the toolpath then again the surfaces are a non-factor. With reversing anything people are always looking for the magic button and Verisurf is not a magic button, but gives you so many more abilities to do things that for the price is well worth the investment. Funny ugly is in the eye on the beholder and for anyone to take nothing and turn it into something in less than about 2 minutes using Verisurf how really ugly are those surfaces? Again I could go into deeper detail about all of this, but I think I made my point about the abilities of Verisurf that were not correctly understood. I will be putting together a video soon and I will share it on this and I might even throw some toolpaths on those ugly surfaces just to show anyone interested. One toolpath that comes to mind of the top of my head is the new highspeed toolpath converted over to 5 axis through a spline that cares nothing about surfaces and make really nice paths. I will keep you guys posted if you are really interested. Thanks for the response in this thread and if anyone wants some more information just email and I will be glad to follow up with you. Happy Thanksgiving and I will be in Germany next week, Canada the week after, then Portland.

We have a lot of customer doing heads with Verisurf and using our Custom Surfacing tools and other things with no problems once they are trained. We do give you the ability to do a lot of complex surfaces and other things with free form shapes. I am not going to speak negatively about any other software, but if you have Mastercam then the obvious choice would be Verisurf since we are integrated right into Mastercam. You can bring the point cloud in and then do whatever you want with it. Here are some screen shots on a porting job. How you bring the point cloud in is your choice, but the quality of the cloud is only going ot be a good as what you use to collect it. With a laser collecting device you need line of sight. With a hard probing device like a the Master3DGage arm with a +/- .0007 volumetric accuracy you are insured a good collection of the point. The other things is that as you collect the data and start making the mesh(STL) Verisurf gives you the ability to check back to that Mesh to see the quality of the model as you build it again right inside of Mastercam. Also with Mastercam powerful machining to STL capabilities you really do not need a surface model to machine the part you could machine it right to the mesh in the right configuration. #1 Here is the Point Cloud. #2 We then right Click on the points and create a Mesh. #3 Then right click on the Mesh and pick the AutoSurface tool. #4 Here is our surface Model using color faces for the surfaces. We have some options on the Autosurface that can allow us to ramp up the exactness of the mesh or turn it down to give us more free form surfaces. Again this is all inside on Mastercam. From here we could do a lot of different things. We could make a solid out of the cavity to make up internal ports on a head or other things. Also the Mesh has tools in it to smooth it as well as create splines from the mesh. Is there other software that does a good job? Sure, but what software gives you the ability to do everything inside of Mastercam? No learning curve on the Mastercam side just some learning on the Verisurf side. Hopefully that was a clear enough example of what Verisurf can do. If you would like a online meeting where someone can show you some different things let me know and I can arrange that. HTH

That is by design we use the surfaces as part of that function and take solids and convert them for that reason. Are you administrator on have unrestricted access to certain folders on the computer that Verisurf and Mastercam reside in?

Don, that is odd could we do a go to meeting om Friday so I can take a look?

Well Mic is it s little more complicated than that. Anyone familiar with ASME 14.5 and ASME 14.41? Both of these deal nicely with what is in reality MBD related to 3D GD & T embedded in the model. So with the add-on of MBD you now can bring the Catia FTA/MBD directly into Mastercam. Now lets say your company had got Verisurf as well. You also now got a PAS for your inspection software and CAM software. What is a PAS well that is what is called Product Assurance Software. NIST developed what they call a digital artifact to check the algorithms of software to make sure they correctly interrupt what geometric shapes are in the software. The reason for this was a lot of software was corrupting models when they were translated from one to the other because of poor math. The NIST when run and checked back to the expected results should yield no more than .0001 deviation. The cool thing is with Verisurf you can certify your inspection and manufacturing software all with one test that takes anywhere from 30 second to 5 minutes depending on your computer. Getting back to the MBD being brought into the CAM software you now know what was in Catia without having to have Catia. Another cool thing if you had Verisurf you could then use that MBD inside of Mastercam to check the part back to that MBD. The Verisurf would create an inspection report using that MBD for the reporting without you having to fill all of that out for an AS9102 inspection report. Hopefully more and more companies will get on board to taking dumb models and making them live models. Oh with the $100 year add on from Verisurf you can turn any Mastercam model in to a full blown MBD or 3DGD & T model. Cool thing about that add on is the ability to get dimension right off of solid and surfaces models without the need for any wireframe. Another cool feature is the 3D text for all dimensions. Check out the free Verisurf add-on at the top of the Mastercam forum for get a 30 day evaluation of it.

Can you send a screen shot so we can see what is going on? Please include your system information as well.

Rick thanks for that, but what I think you are seeing is where for some strange reason when Verisurf is loaded the error box shows sometimes our name even though it is a Mastercam error. It most times is a run out of memory error or something along those line because of the size of the file. Unload Verisurf open it you will then see Mastercam error and not Verisurf errors. HTH