GibbsCAM 2011 has multiple new capabilities, including an Auto Wizard within Hole Manager, which enables users to store default settings for reuse and invoke the Hole Wizard multiple times quickly. Using the streamlined Hole Manager options, users can take a part with hundreds of holes and, in three mouse clicks, auto-recognize and program them all, the company says.
The current version also features an Attribute Manager and a Feature Manager with tagging capabilities that open the door to querying, creation, modification, sorting and filtering of elements by user-defined and system metadata tags. When importing models, users can control whether to import attributes and geometry and how to do so. Users can define features of any kind by grouping feature geometry or elements that share a specified attribute.
The software’s Color Modes feature enables users to switch among color modes when a part contains user-defined features, or when any of its elements are tagged with a color attribute. Other new hole capabilities are included for selecting, recognizing and drilling holes. Several new Variable Peck cycles and various options for user-defined custom drill cycles are available, and a new check box enables reverse-order drilling.
An additional enhancement is that in opening models from SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer, and other major CAD/CAM packages, GibbsCAM now reads model attributes, then recognizes and preserves them as attributes in the GibbsCAM part file. Colors are preserved as CAD colors in the part file, and hole features in the model are interpreted as hole features recognizable and usable by Hole Manager and its Auto Wizard.
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