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Hi Everyone,

I've been reading through all those comments and I have to admit I understand most of the negative comments here.  I've been using/supporting FeatureCAM for 17 years now and I totally understand when you say you are not seeing as many new features being developed in FeatureCAM.  I think it's important to put things into perspective though.  Is Fusion ready to replace FeatureCAM?  I personally don't think so either simply because of the variety of machine types it supports compared to FeatureCAM.  Over the years, I can't count how many times customers have requested for better design functionalities which we were never really able to provide since we were mainly focusing of CAM.  I know many of you also use another software for design aside from FeatureCAM.  With Fusion, Autodesk is trying to allow you to use FeatureCAM and Fusion for no additional cost to save you money on a separate software renewal you may be using.  Many of you will say to that they don't need any other CAD software, which is fine since you still have access to pretty much everything now in FeatureCAM.  Here I mean that since January, every subscribers of FeatureCAM Premium has been granted Ultimate which opens every single option in the software.  In the CAM world, we are pretty much all the same, we learn the software, then we get used to 20% of it's functionalities and stick to them.  You would be surprised to know how many people asked me for "new features" that have actually been available for a long time.  All that to say maybe some of you feel like they didn't get anything new, but most of our customers were using premium and were all given Ultimate for free which brought a huge deal of new stuff.  Also want to point out I still do benchmark against most of our competitors and FeatureCAM is still ahead of the market in most cases.  Now, about Fusion.  I won't surprise anyone in saying Fusion is Autodesk Cloud Based Design & Manufacturing Solution.  This is where a lot of devloppement is going for the simple reason we believe it's the way to go in the future.  Again, having supported FeatureCAM/PowerMill/Partmaker/Powershape for all those years, the amount of time customers reached out to me asking for functionalities from one product to be added to the other one is uncountable.  That is what Fusion is becoming.  We are adding FeatureCAM automation, PowerMill high quality toolpaths, PartMaker advance turning, Powershape design functions, Nesting capabilities (that were also requested quite a few times in FeatureCAM) to get the best of all worlds inside of a single solution so that you don't have to worry about using multiple products to be successful in every department of your shop.  On top of that, to answer the post processor question, we are looking at building a machine sim that will represent exactly what the post generates since they will be tied together.  Now, will everything be ready tomorrow morning?  Of course not which is why we are keeping FeatureCAM and all the other one up to date, fixing bugs and adding few new features here and there where it makes sense to make sure our customers are still being successful with the product.  Do we have a plan to retire FeatureCAM?  Not that I'm aware off since again, Cloud based solution is not meant for everyone.

 

Trying to be as honest as possible here, hope it helps!



Michael Grenier
Senior Solution Engineer