The modeling environment is still active and a fully functional part of any workflow. The operations of CAM and modeling are not mutually exclusive. (More often than not, I missed something and have to correct it.) This is quite nice when trying to find an operation, or for me, visually verify that the toolpath is going to behave as I expected. Picking an operation from the browser caused Inventor to overlay the toolpath visually on the part in the graphics window. From here, any of the operations can be edited, reordered, and deleted as needed. The browser catalogs the operations into a standard tree-based format. The CAM tab offers the main functions of a CAM operation:
HSM Express is added into Inventor with two main interface changes:
I was surprised at the simplicity and overall capability. While I felt that the product must certainly be nearly useless, I could not have been further from the truth. While there are other products on the market that are more powerful, more refined, and capable, they lack three very important aspects of software design:Īutodesk recently released Inventor HSM Express support for Inventor, pulling the rest of us into the CAM support fold. It behaves similarly to HSMWorks, and stores all the toolpath data inside the respective model files. HSM Express is a nifty 2.5D milling application for SolidWorks that offers decent toolpath creation, tool management, and post-processing for CAM users. In fact, Autodesk just released the 2014 product version of HSMWorks for SolidWorks, and we still have not seen any evidence of an Inventor build, which brings us to HSMWorks’ very interesting and free milling product. Speculation has arisen at what will become of the product line, and if the company would jettison SolidWorks support. Every aspect of the software design was built modularly, and as such offered a great way to port the product over to other software, including our very own Autodesk Inventor®. The entire package is completely supported and stored inside the SolidWorks design environment. HSMWorks offers a truly integrated CAM solution for SolidWorks, with 5 axis mill as well as lathe support. The recent purchase of Autodesk HSMWorks was quite a surprise to many, but makes sense in numerous ways. Let’s take a look at Inventor HSM Express, and what Autodesk has in store for use with Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM). While the full-featured product is still not available to us, the Express version is already in use. It did not take too long before Autodesk Inventor HSM integration became available and users got their first glimpse of 100 percent CAM integration from the company. Back March 5th, 2014 Integrated CAM with HSM ExpressĪutodesk recently purchased HSMWorks, a Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) company that developed a completely integrated solution for SolidWorks.
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