I know everyone has their favorites, and I am trying to choose between these ones. Right now we use MasterCAM. We dont own it, but the guy who owns the machine shop next door lets us bring over part files and make G-code. We hand-write a lot of the g-code, and use CAM to output some of the more difficult or repetitive toolpaths.
Years back we were using Inventor for CAD. I had previous experience with Pro/E but I always found it to be difficult (non-intuitive) to use. One of the guys who does most of the CAD work uses Rhino, which I never was thrilled with. After playing with SolidWorks a bit, I really like it and I have found it lets me very quickly design what I need. I also like that it has a renderer and that there are available CAM packages for it that integrate with the program.
So we're trying to make a decision on what CAM program to buy. We got an online demo of OneCNC but without actually being able to use the software myself, I'd never buy it - because its always easy when a pro is showing you how to do something. Also, during the demo the guy had trouble coming up with a toolpath to cut one of our major parts - his solution worked sort-of, but it was a roundabout solution and the toolpath would have not been exactly right and it seemed we found a limitation of the software. But overall OneCNC looks great.
But now that I have tried solidworks, we're thinking of buying that, and that raises the question of CAMWorks and SolidCam. CAMWorks wants me to talk to a reseller before they even let me demo it - I have no desire to have some salesman "stopping by" to try to sell me on something, I just want to try the damn software. I am downloading a demo of SolidCAM and I will try that this coming week.
Any comments on whether SolidCAM is better than CAMWorks? How do they compare to OneCNC?
What we do is 3-D machining on a VMC as well as 4-axis (twin turret) turning on a lathe with live tooling. I imagine at some point we may get into 5-axis stuff, so although I dont wanna pay for it, I would like the software to have the capaibility to do it (or be upgraded to do it). I dont care about drawing parts in the CAM package at all, I only want it to be CAM.
So far it looks like SolidCAM and OneCNC are the leaders - barring any compelling evidence to look more closely at CAMWorks or VisualMill. I did look into MasterCAM X2, but the price is just ridiculous, especially when you consider what a shoddy piece of software MasterCAM 9 is (and when I got a demo of X, it looks like they just grafted on a windows interface to the underlying crap). We are not happy with the intelligence/performance of MCam when it comes to toolpaths and we thank our lucky stars that we never bought it
. Visual Mill looks OK, I got some demo at EastTech but it seemed to crash alot and we were fighting it to get the toolpaths we really wanted - and again like MC it came up with some stupid toolpaths that were very inefficient, so unless there is major evidence to the contrary, I *think* we are "all set" with MCam X and VisualMill.
Long post - so... any comments?