Powermill 2010 32 Bit Crack
Olegario Benford
Hi!
The company (plastic injection mold maker) where I work is planning to switch from PowerMill to other software. Candidates are WorkNc, hyperMill and Siemens NX. I used WorkNc and NX a long time ago (> 10 years).
If some of you have experience with any of them, I would like to get pros and cons about these softwares.
Either way, allow me to switch gears and redirect the discussion.
Why are you choosing to switch from PowerMill? It looks like a lot of the work you have been doing on the forum is macro related, helping and building custom macros.
Jonathan, Autodesk cannot fall asleep and assume every customer is here to stay. Software industry seems to be a very competitive business. I am in touch will many mold shops in the midwest area, and can tell you this question comes up every time the yearly support bill comes sliding across the desk. I've often question this myself. It's a huge cost to be switching software, but if the payoff is in a few years it makes it all worthwhile. SPEED, SPEED, SPEED, when the other guys calculate toolpaths quicker, it makes the switch very tempting.
Mike, I completely agree with you and I don't feel that that is the case. I know they have a lot planned for the PowerMill and Fusion products and basically they want to be able to develop things that will, if it makes sense be input into both products. In order to do this, they will need to update the 20+ year old code that is currently in PowerMill which is what we see as speed improvements, but its actually a much bigger picture that is opening up.
Powermill 2018 and 2019 were the worst releases ever I had 18months of sheer hell, constant crashing, deep system bugs, inability for toolpaths to produce the toolpath they are supposed to.. in that 18 months I sent in more support tickets than the previous 10 years combined. The software had become unreliable because of these constant issues, reinstatement of previously solved bugs and every new patch seemed to break as much as it fixed.
We have now moved to a different CAM system, where I don't have these issues.. only had to deal with the learning curve. We still keep a couple of seats of powermill, at the moment, because of all our legacy projects.
I hated moving away from Powermill but I had no other choice, I just could not do my work with the software the way it is.. too slow and unreliable. I hope Autodesk pull their finger out and do something or they will end up losing more customers.. it's too late for me as I am very happy with our new choice.
Sorry to see you leave and move to other software alternatives. I am happy to hear that it is working for you and what you do, I am also happy to see you are still an active part of this public forum.
Jonathan, I think that is most of Powermill's users biggest frustration is since Autodesk acquired Powermill, they dump their development on how to we make Fusion like Powermill? We all bought Powermill, not Fusion. We are paying a PREMIUM for Powermill features and development. Powermill development shouldn't suffer and slow down development because that feature needs to be made for Fusion as well. And for that matter, if these developments are being made for both software's at the same time, the Powermill version isn't being devolved to it's fullest potential because it has to be dumbed down to work for Fusion. It seems that Powermill users are getting the short end of the stick for what we're paying for and Fusion users are coat-tailing on our Powermill subscription fees to pay for Fusion development.
I still strongly feel that once they have the ancient code of PowerMill sorted and re-written, we will see some great things. Just like any other software that's been around for 20+ years, there will come a time that the code will need to be updated or it will cease to perform as expected.
I remember the biggest gripe back when 2017 hit was that everything was slow, very slow. Users stuck with 2016 as a platform and wound't consider trying anything else until 2018 or even 2019 came out and they still said that things were slow. I know this first hand because I would speak with you guys and report your issues and gripes. Now we are seeing these speed increases that everyone has requested and we still aren't happy.
We have done quite a bit with PowerMill since the aquisition of Delcam, below is a list. I encourage you to sign up for the upcoming advanced manufacturing summit where we will discuss our advanced manufacturing products including PowerMill.
We have a great community here full of amazing users doing incredible things, no doubt there is something that everyone needs or wants that is different than everyone else's needs and wants. So let's keep sending in the requests for new features, bugs and change requests to make PowerMill even better than it is today.
It's not that management isn't satisfied with Powermill, since they're not familiar with its capabilities in any real depth (nor are they any more aware of other competing softwares' capabilities).
What the current owner isn't pleased with is the Autodesk subscription model, because he wants a perpetual license instead, even if that means future upgrades are not included in the price like they are in a subscription.
According to his calculations and some price quotes, CAM software "should be free" from the third year (i.e. two years' worth of Autodesk subscriptions is the same as the price of some perpetual licenses).
That said, there won't be any changes this year because we won't have the extra capacity needed for training and customization.
I have never been a fan of software as a service, or the subscription model, but I have resigned myself to it. We used to pay maintenance, now we pay subscription, it is what it is. There really was no option not to switch, the maintenance pricing was just going to keep increasing.
Thanks to those of you contributing to this topic. It's great to hear feedback from our community of users (even if you're airing concerns) as it allows you to express your concerns and gives us the opportunity to find ways to fix them.
I'd like to chip in re: the improvements made to PowerMill in recent years. As Brian kindly shared in the above post we have continued to focus on improving the core user experience of PowerMill. This has seen multiple speed ups and bug fixes that have had a BIG impact on program stability - with fewer crashes, better quality toolpaths, safer collision-checking and more - all of which should result in better outcomes for anyone using PowerMill. We regularly carry out performance checks to compare the speed and reliability of the latest release (currently 2021.0.2) with legacy versions - going back as far as 2016 (yep - we go back 6 full release cycles). During our last checks, we determined that (for many of the most commonly used commands) PowerMill 2021 is faster than all 6 of these legacy releases. I'll be revealing more about this in the Advanced Manufacturing Summit (see details below).
We also use automated, anonymized CER (customer error reports) that are created in the event that PowerMill becomes unstable, to monitor performance and allow us to identify issues that need fixing. I thought it would be useful to provide some insights into the CER system to show how PowerMill reliability has improved. The attached image shows a snapshot in time and compares the crash rate for PowerMill 2021 with previous releases (2020, 2019, and 2018). We can't go back any further than this as the CER tool was only introduced when Delcam joined Autodesk in 2016.
The chart shows the percentage of PowerMill sessions that resulted in a premature crash. For PowerMill 2021, the chart covers a time period from the initial release date (13th May) until a few days ago - meaning a total of around 3 months. The figures for 2020, 2019, and 2018 have been normalized to provide the equivalent 3 month time period from when they were released (resulting in a fair comparison). As you can see, PowerMill 2021 has a significantly lower crash frequency than the other versions. 95% of users of 2021 have experienced zero crashes. Of the remainder, 3% of users have experienced 1 crash, 1.5% have experienced 2 - 4 crashes, and the remaining 0.5% of users have experienced 5 or more crashes. Compare these figures with the numbers for 2020, 2019, and 2018 and you'll see a considerable improvement in the stability and reliability.
@clinton.perry Does the summit plan to have actual updates on powermill rather than just show us how fusion is coming along? I understand the speed and stability improvements are helpful, but to see all the new toolpaths go to a software that I cannot use does not excite me about the future of powermill.
We will be sharing plans for Fusion 360 development during the summit. It's worth noting that many of these improvements will impact/benefit PowerMill users too. Why is this? Well, while you may not be using Fusion 360 now - it is worth noting that it uses much of the underlying source code that PowerMill is built upon. So any changes we make are likely to impact both products. I really like what @Jonathan.Artiss-DSI says above about PowerMill being around for 20+ years. In fact, PowerMill was born in June 1995 (more than 25 years ago) and has hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
The opportunity to use Fusion 360 as a development platform to re-imagine and modernize how PowerMill works, opens up some exciting opportunities for us to develop innovative functionality in addition to making incremental speed-ups.
I'm fortunate to attend bi-weekly meetings with the PowerMill development teams - where we discuss current development activities. While I can't say too much here, I can reassure you that the team is actively working on new strategies to simplify the most commonly used toolpath types with the goal of making CAM programming parts easier and producing significantly better quality surface finishes. We'll be sharing more news later in the year (so watch this space).
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