Hi Geg, My war story is 5 versions of TurboCAD before I finally realized I was caught into the updates were really bug fixes under the presentation of improvements and nothing worked right. I started with Version 1. Stopped buying it at Version 5 and I think at one point they were at version 12 or something.
Autocad for me was always a disaster. Just couldn't get my head around it. I rediscovered CAD with Alibre. Suddenly drawing was easy and the price reasonable. Then came the upgrades with all the tool buttons that make no sense. Hover the mouse over it and get the help message that explains what the tool button does. A step backwards as far as I saw. Assemblies were another change that are no longer intuitive for the way my brain works. The tutorial video disks I bought became useless because the software changed. But I couldn't go back to the older version because the licensing had changed. I saw the GIBBs on their web site. Was wondering if that was new and maybe that was why they've dropped support of MecSoft. I didn't like what I saw in the demo stuff anyway. Today I ran the MecSoft VisualMill Standalone product importing my latest project as an stp file. It's a bit more extensive than the plug in. Usage about the same. Scariest part was really just selecting the lines or parts that the CAM is supposed to work within our around. With the Plugin it's easy to just to go the list of objects and select on the CAD side. The stand alone is much more difficult. Not impossible. But more difficult. >From the looks of the messages on this thread though there is really nothing like the Alibre/Mecsoft bundle out there on Linux. Especially not with sheet metal and assemblies and some of the other Alibre features. John > As to GEOMAGIC - Keep in mind the parent company 3D Systems bought out > Gibbs - as in Virtual Gibbs CAD/CAM which used to be an OEM installed > option on FADAL CNC mills. In looking at Gibbs now it looks antiquated still > being more wireframe based (like my really old BOBCAD). Honestly I think > they should support both the Visualmill plugin and the external (for now) > Gibbs CAM because they use very different methods. A MasterCAM user is > NOT going to be happy with Gibbs as is, but would not be too lost to work > with the VisualCAM plugin. > > 3D Systems is going to loose 2 sales (Geomagic + Gibbs) instead of just one > (Geomagic + Visualmill). > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
