Mastercam’s ‘CAD for CAM’ Design Tools for Faster Job Completion

Tolland, US – Mastercam is well-known for its precision NC programming, but it also provides a suite of shop-tested design tools aimed at getting parts on and off the machine as quickly as possible. In addition to 3D surfacing and solids, powerful modeling tools include hole-filling, direct editing without a solids history, geometry repair, and more.

Mastercam Design, a computer-aided design solution streamlines and simplifies geometry modeling and editing. It also supports advanced geometry creation, such as solid and surface modeling, hybrid machining, NURBS curves and surfaces, 2D & 3D associative dimensioning, surface extension, blending, trimming, splitting, variable filleting, and hybrid modeling, allowing to finish jobs faster and more efficiently.

Enhancements to Solids

Mastercam Design can recognize hole geometry in solid bodies with no history, including intersecting and non-conventional holes. When it discovers these holes, one can save the custom holes to a template for future use by using expanded options. The design solutions Add History function can be used to detect complex holes in solid bodies, by simply selecting Hole operations to find all holes that fall within the entered minimum and maximum radius values. Mastercam generates an operation for each detected unique hole style.

Wireframe and Note Enhancements

Modifying geometry by dragging the mouse is now available for Trim to Entities, Fillet Entities, and Chamfer Entities functions. On dragging the mouse, Mastercam performs the function on the wireframe entities the mouse encounters. DrillPt functionality can now be incorporated into small arcs in the design solution. By adding many of the capabilities of the Create Letters function into the Note function, Mastercam makes it easier to create text for notes and labels. The redesigned function panel on Note provides users with improved usability, more options, and greater control.

Mastercam Design Enhancements

The design solution includes two new flowline functions, Edit UV and Reflow UV, that can be used to analyze and modify the UV direction on surface models in order to make the flowline milling toolpaths more effective. Furthermore, it can mirror geometry about both the X & Y axes in a single operation, and the user can draw a window to select multiple faces to change the color of a set of solid faces.

Image Source: CNC Software, Inc