![]() ![]() CAD software creates digital 2D and 3D drawings, essentially replacing manual drafting with an automated process. What Are The Benefits of CAD/CAM Software?Ĭomputer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) tools help product teams precisely design physical products. ![]() What Processes Are Automated By CAD/CAM Software?.What Are The Benefits of CAD/CAM Software?.There are noises in that direction with something called “SolidWorks 3D Experience for Makers”, but it doesn’t work yet. There is no “SolidWorks lite” yet, something that bridges the gap between the full version of SW and the student version. If you need commercial use and Vetric doesn’t do it… your only real option is to buy Mastercam, and maybe SolidWorks too. If you can live with the “no commercial use” limits, the student version of SW/MC are the answer - that’s what I do. ![]() If you want a one-time purchase, no restrictions, no hoop-jumping, the Vetric options are the way to go. In the free CAD/CAM space… not even close. In the Photoshop space, you can totally use GIMP and accomplish 90% of what Photoshop can do. There are a couple of free options, but given how niche CAD/CAM is, none of them are remotely comparable to their commercial counterparts. There’s also Vetric, who have software tuned towards “sign and plaque” folks (although you can do more than just that - but not as complete as SW/MC) for a price range between $200 and $1000 a seat, single purchase, no subscription. This is great for a pure hobbyist it’s problematic for a small business where the costs of a seat of SolidWorks and Mastercam will buy you two machines. The only catch is that it is for non-commercial use only. Meanwhile, SolidWorks and Mastercam have made their student versions available to the general public for around $100 each per year through Titans of CNC. So Fusion as a viable solution is pretty much dead. Once the usability got good enough, they started putting the screws to their user base, locking features up behind a paywall, putting extra restrictions on the free version, and lately they’ve been having outright service outages where (cloud-based, right?) it just doesn’t work. And I’ll be damned if it didn’t get usable after a while.īut Autodesk gonna Autodesk. ![]() But it was free… and being largely cloud-based, it was easy for Autodesk to update and they got a ton of diagnostic data from their ever-growing user base. The CAM was pretty good (it was based on a previous CAM plugin for SolidWorks) but the modelling was just awful. So everyone and their dog (me included) jumped on the Fusion 360 train.Įarly Fusion was terrible. And they used the exact same software workflow as the big industrial machines.Īutodesk (whose lunch SolidWorks had decidedly eaten a decade earlier) decided to make a cloud-based SolidWorks clone, and then - amazingly - released it for free, with a specific focus on the new hobby market. Nowhere near as capable, mind, but capable enough to be worth pursuing. Suddenly, an average punter could own something that was a scaled-down professional machine. The overwhelming winners in this category were SolidWorks for CAD, and Mastercam for CAM.īut the explosion in 3D printing opened the door to cheap motion control, and that got applied to various designs of cheap 3-axis CNC gantry routers. Because the software that drives these machines was used to make money - and was terribly niche - the software was also very expensive on the order of $5k a seat and then yearly maintenance costs if you wanted ongoing upgrades and on-site support. Up until very recently, CNC machining and CAD/CAM was the exclusive domain of industrial machines whose entry price point was on the order of $75k and went far, far north of that. So you’ve arrived at a weird point in time with regards to CNC software. So a cheap, good enough, not too complex solution.the opinion of pros that use CAD/CAM, for complex stuff, a lot, commercially is not super useful here because that's never going to be me. I want something I learn the basic "ropes" on once and rely on that for the next 20 years. I'm a bit older (definitely not a boomer though lol), very occasional user, really, looking to the future, if I did 10 simple projects a year I would be very surprised and I doubt I'd be graduating to doing complex stuff. I used AutoCAD a little in my youth, that was easier to understand. I have a computer background, I had a play with Fusion, it was confusing to me and I don't like the pricing "model" (I don't want a "maker" version that they constantly move the goalposts on) so I'm ruling that one out and the same for Solidworks. I honestly don't have a problem paying a little bit for some half decent CAD/CAM software, not a subscription though, let's say a max lifetime cost of $1000. I'm new to CAD/CAM, I'm running my 6040 using LinuxCNC. ![]()
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