InventorCam sucks. Here's why.
(Background: I'm using InventorCam 2012 with Autodesk Inventor 2013, at TechShop. I've used Aspire's Cut2D and VCarve, and Sprutcam in the past. I've used Inventor extensively, and SolidWorks a little. I'm a programmer who does some machining.)
The program
InventorCam is terribly brittle. It crashes. A lot. When it crashes, it takes Autodesk Inventor down with it. Inventor then "phones home" to Autodesk to report the crash, I fill oujt the crash form, and get a useless response back from Autodesk. Things which will crash it include
- Trying to define stock with a 3D model without having deselected automatic definition of stock back in the preferences before starting. (Crashes every time, by bringing up a dialog box with one greyed out "Resume" button from which there is no escape.)
- Switching back and forth from the Inventor model to the CAM environment (Crashes sometimes, and sometimes just loses the CAM environment.)
The documentation (at
Documentation - InventorCAM CAM software) consists of endless tutorials and fuzzy videos of screenshots. There's no reference manual that I can find that lists all the things it can do and what all the menu options do. The "contextual help" just throws you to the beginning of a big HTML document.
It's not clear where it saves its CAM files, what they do, or when they get saved. It seems to be necessary to reset preferences for the program to indicate where the files for a project should go. But after doing that, not all the files seem to go there. Most of the time, even with what seem to be all the correct options set, CAM files are saved in some default place, not with the project. Nor does file save seem to be integrated with Inventor Pack and Go. If you're using different computers, as we have to do at TechShop, you lose the CAM files frequently.
This is just inept programming and design.
The approach to CAM
InventorCam's approach to CAM is much dumber than the promotional material would indicate. It's dumber that Sprutcam. For the basic 2 1/2D operations, it doesn't really understand Inventor geometry. It just lets you extract edges from Inventor models. InventorCam doesn't really understand Inventor solids or faces. Unlike SprutCam, it doesn't understand what's already been machined away. So, for example, when you want to machine a pocket, you have to select the pocket's edge, section by section. Then you have to select the upper machining level and the pocket bottom level. You can't just select the bottom face of the pocket and have the program take the appropriate data from Inventor's model. InventorCam isn't smart enough to avoid machining air, either.
Inventor doesn't understand what's an outside edge of the part. It's possible to create a pocket with an open edge manually, which tells the system to go a little beyond the edge and smooth it off, but this only works if it's a straight line. Facing a flat land area requires more user work than it should. Again, the user has to tell the program something it already knows. Pocketing is also rather lame in that you have to manually set "Left" or "Right" in the "Technology" menu, depending on the direction of cut, to avoid cutting the outside of the pocket rather than the inside. Another example of InventorCam not really using the Inventor geometry in a useful way.
Yes, some of the checking and simulation tools understand what's been cut away, but the CAM planning tools expect the user to tell the program things it should already know.
There are about eight different machining simulation tools, most of which either don't work consistently or don't tell you much. One solid model simulator that Just Works would be more useful.
Conclusion
The overall feel is of a program put together with "agile" programming, resulting in a collecton of features in search of an architecture.
(I've tried SprutCam. SprutCam seems to have been written by Russian math geniuses but not debugged well. The hard parts involving understanding the geometry are impressive. The user interface isn't bad. Then, every once in a while, you hit some lame bug such as having some operation adjust improperly for tool holder length.)