The Death Of Stand-alone CAM

The problem for stand-alone CAM is that you need great CAD to have great CAM. Stand-alone CAM from Gibbscam, Featurecam, Mastercam, Surfcam, Smartcam, etc. has 20 year old CAD based on wireframe geometry. Over the years in order to try and keep up with the changes in the CAD world, CAM compaines have used the Parasolid kernel or in some cases the ACIS kernel and basically thrown very basic solid modeling on top of their outdated wireframe CAD modelers. This cobbled together approach has gotten to the point where it’s quickly becoming a bad joke compared to the quality graphics and solid modeling you get in say a package like Solid Edge with ST or SolidWorks.  As way of an example, it’s very easy to see how much better the chaining in SolidCAM (which runs inside of SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor) is with its bright and clear colors that stand out and shaded direction arrows as compared to say Mastercam’s horrible thin wireframe lines and arrows which often disappear completely from the screen!

While I’m not a fan of SolidWorks, because of SolidWorks lack of direct modeling tools that many CAM users need to  make major modifications to history based SolidWorks files,  a product like SpaceClaim or SolidEdge with ST can now be used to make the needed changes with ease.  This removes the last major hurdle to having CAM run inside of SolidWorks.

CAM companies don’t have the funds to create the kind of CAD that SolidWorks has and no solution has emerged and been successful in convincing CAM companies that a viable alternative to running inside of SolidWorks exists. By viable alternative I mean a private label CAD that would appear to a CAM user as something the CAM company developed themselves. I happen to think SpaceClaim would be ideal for this but SpaceClaim is too busy working on utter nonsense such as being able to model without a mouse by touching your monitor. To me it doesn’t get much more stupid than wasting time and money on nonsense like this.

When you run CAM inside SolidWorks you gain the following benefits over stand-alone CAM:

Much better graphics, much better chaining, much better user interface to work with, much better geometry selection and filtering tools, the ability to create configurations and assemblies,  no need to move back and forth between SolidWorks and stand-alone CAM constantly,  a much more robust tree (no rediculous red insertion arrow like Mastercam uses), etc.

Stand-alone CAM is headed out and better companies will dump it ASAP and gain serious advantages over their competitors.

For the record CNC Software offers a stripped down limited version of Mastercam that runs inside of SolidWorks. How does it compare to other CAM programs that have run inside SolidWorks for many years?

To call Mastercam For SolidWorks a bad joke and years behind products like SolidCAM would be the kindest thing I could say.