Why no updates to Inventor Cam?

[griptechshop]

I have the deign suite. I'm paying ten times more than fusion for essentially Inventor and Inventor Cam. My gripe is that all the development is with Fusion cam and all these great enhancements don't get transferred over to Inventor cam. It should be simple upgrade, as it's the same kernel. Why don't we see Inventor cam being updated with all the fusion cam updates??? How long do we have to wait?

Cheers,

Trevor

[Knaap]

I think you'll get Crickets, because Autodesk doesn't want to tell us that eventually they want to have most of everything inside of Fusion. They're busy building populairity on Fusion to get as many customers attached as possible. HSMworks/InventorHSM(CA<) customers are paying for Fusion's evolution basicly.

[KRoser_12]

Completely agree. Iam sorry but i need to write this down, but after nearly 6 years with HSMWorks/InventorHSM I lost all my hope and patience with this CAM. It is realy sad how autodesk cut off all paying customers. In this CAM software industry we need to have constant bug fixes and new technologies (our company and living depending on that) and we are paying a lot of money for that. Its absolutely unexceptable to go nearly half a year wihout release. I will be looking to get another CAM system. It will be hard and expensive but i se no hope.

[griptechshop]

I hear you. I might do the same after my subscription expires. It is so obvious that they have forgotten about their paying customers. This video is quite interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGYPagFaALg  but I feel it is all talk. There has been no updates to Inventor Cam for ages, while Fusion gets upgraded seemingly on a monthly basis. It's the same program essentially!!! And here we are paying 10 times as much for a forgotten about program.

Is there anyone at Autodesk willing to comment?

[KRoser_12]

Yeah. I dont beleve anything that autodesk promises and says (they were promising new tool libary for maybe 4years annnnd nothing) The worst thing about InventorHSM (or how they call it now) is thats full of bugs and stupid things. I have been screaming for new simulation for years now because simulation is just unusable and i dont beleve in it (and that is realy realy bad in itself because you have no faith in program before you ran it). The bigest thing for me is adaptive toolpath handeling thin walls i batle this thing every day. Turning is just absolutely stupid that most basic turning features are just not there. I can go for days like that.

[milan_vasic]

I've been watching that lately, too. The development at HSM looks very backwards.

Wouldn't it be a nice sign of protest if you could just enumerate alternative CAM systems here in the forum that you should take if you cancel the HSM contract soon?

So I ask. On which CAM system would you like to change?
Maybe this will wake Autodesk up.

If they react objectively and provide concrete information when something happens and what exactly happens next with the CAM, then we know what is going on.
If they delete this post, because they don't want to have something like that in their own forum, then we also know what's going on. Then you should change the CAM as soon as possible. Because then they want to hide problems only.

What do you say?

[j.labdik]

We picked up inventor cam for one reason and one reason only: its cheaper than esprit for simple parts. Programming a part in inventor cam that requires 3 axis work is great. However the lack of multi axis support is astonishing. I've seen some improvements for fusion lately online that developers are finishing up 4 axis 3D machining. However absolutely none of it for inventor cam customers. I also don't know why hsm for solidworks has other features such as axis substitution that would be vital for our work. I don't want to jump between 3 different programs just because autodesk isn't improving them equally. Especially if cross platform compatibility isn't even a thing. 

When it comes to a really complex part? I still have to pick up my esprit license which costs over 40 grand for 1 seat. When I ask my reseller about these parts the answer I get is: "well power mill can do that kind of operation but it costs more"

If my work demands more multi axis work then I think I'll be forced to switch my company back to esprit entirely. 

[griptechshop]

Yes, I feel the same way. It might be back to Gibbscam for me. 

[JoeBarnes4076]

Here is the roadmap from Al Whatmough @ AU : https://www.autodesk.com/autodesk-university/class/CAM-Road-Map-Discussion-2018#video

[JoeBarnes4076]

Here is the roadmap from Al Whatmough @ AU : https://www.autodesk.com/autodesk-university/class/CAM-Road-Map-Discussion-2018#video

[griptechshop]

Yeah, nothing in that discussion/video gave me any confidence that they will carry the updates from Fusion through to Inventor Cam. He trails off with "..but Fusion cam will eventually pull away from Inventor cam.." This is basically saying no we wont keep updating Inventor Cam!!!!!! 

Beyond frustrated!!!

[Knaap]

Disapointing to say the least guys, we will keep InventorHSM/CAM because all of our guys are pretty know with it and will try to get the current Inventor version as stable as possible. (It crashes a lot!)

Now, we will go and invest time in looking into other Systems to replace some of HSM though. 

4 adn 5th axis toolpaths are so far behind what was 'promised' that we just are done waiting, we most likely won't go for fusion in the future and just run InventorHSM for 'simple' stuff and the other CAM for more ellaborate parts.

Lame move Autodesk, very lame.

[Bartlett-Pentagon]

This is disturbing. 

They would have me drop 6 seats of Inventor to go to Fusion ?. Last time I checked, Fusion was horrible for large assemblies. I deigned a 60000 sq ft facility with hundreds of machined parts with changes/ updates continuing. Steering away from integrated CAD/CAM I guess ?.

[al.whatmough]

I thought I should chime in here

It seems there has been some confusion around the future of CAM in Inventor due to the increase of causalities of Fusion 360.   There is a reality that Fusion 360 is beginning to pull ahead in terms of the breadth of Manufacturing functionality and will continue to.  At the same time, we have attempted to stabilize the releases of Inventor CAM to Qtrly updates.  

While I know this does not meet the needs of all users, I may suggest leveraging your access to Fusion 360 as part of the collection.  Using technology like anycad will allow you to maintain parametric relationships between CAD and CAM.  

I should state clearly, for HSMWorks and Inventor CAM, there is no current plan for changing the offering. They remain supported including back versions as usual.

[rileymariol]

Thought I would write this post as I wait for Inventor to finish crashing so I can boot it back up. I am slightly more hopeful as to the future of Inventor CAM, albeit not much. The reality is that some of us want badly to use fusion but are unable to due to the cloud functionality. I cannot have my company's work on the cloud no matter how secure it is. Whether that is an antiquated view of my management or not, that is just the reality. And to be underserved as many of us feel we are, is just unfortunate since those of us with the manufacturing suite are paying more than anyone else for what is inherently 6 month to one year old Fusion features.

[DarthBane55]

Using technology like anycad will allow you to maintain parametric relationships between CAD and CAM.  

Will anycad open files from the Vault?  We went all in with the Vault here, really good for us, but if we are better off using Fusion, can we keep the Vault? 

Fusion is nice, but the assemblies are very limited as far as keeping links from components to assembly, then edit some stuff in assemblies on the model, you need to break the link, at which point it is no longer associative (this is often useful with CAM).  We have so many assemblies and sub-assemblies, that Fusion is definitely not an option for us, to go all in in Fusion and leave Inventor I mean.  So if anycad can open the models and assemblies from the Vault, then we could continue modeling in Inventor, but use CAM in Fusion, and that might be an option viable for us.

As a side note, Inventor pretty much never crashes for us, very stable.  It does crash from time to time, but not often, nothing worst than any other software really.  We got decent PCs, clean Windows installs, and it runs really smooth for us.

[JoeBarnes4076]

We use Inventor and Vault and we jumped to the Product Design & Manufacturing Collection so we could utilize the fully integrated CAM package.  We no plans to use Fusion 360 for production purposes.

[griptechshop]

The reason I have decided to pay through my neck for the design suite is that I could not stand Fusion one more second. After a year of absolute frustration on Fusion, Inventor is a dream. No more waiting for 10 minutes for large assemblies to update only to inform you that there are 102 conflicts. I have been doing CAD for 20 plus years, so it's not that I am a novice or just impatient, it's just impossible to make this program work for my needs. 

It is very a impressive program for small assemblies at that price point, but it seems that all that new research and energy poured into it is a lost cause because you cant use it for large assemblies. 

At the very least update Inventor cam at the same pace and look after your paying customers!!!

And no I don't want to design on Inventor and cam on Fusion.... how would this make sense? 

[DarthBane55]

Just a quick reply to the last comment "And no I don't want to design on Inventor and cam on Fusion.... how would this make sense? " clearly aimed at me because I wrote that if anycad could read assemblies and models from the vault I could try to use CAM in fusion but still do cad in inventor.

So, not saying it makes total sense, or that it is very practical either, but if that's what it takes to make it work, I don't see a major problem doing that, since the cad is taken care in inventor.  Anycad doesn't import anything, it reads directly your cad files, so if Fusion is getting ahead in CAM, and I want to take advantage of it, that was a possible solution I would consider.

Still would like an answer about Anycad reading from Vault, Al, any answer for this?

Thanks!

PS: I guess I'll just try it, I don't even really know what anycad is, but i'll read up on it and find out.

[DarthBane55]

I'll answer my own question: no, anycad cannot read from the vault, it reads from the fusion cloud drive period.  So it is not an option for us to use Inventor CAD and Fusion CAM. 

Bug fixes is what we got for the past few updates, nothing to get excited about really...  At the moment, it really feels like we pay for access to our data only, not for updates and improvements and new features, specially when looking at what is happening with Fusion, a bit sad.  It has even been said that the plugins are not coming to Inventor CAM, so we can clearly see the limitations that we will have quite quickly compared with Fusion.  Even the tool library from Fusion doesn't seem to be coming, we were told roughly 2 years ago that it was coming soon... A bit of a disappointment from the expectations that had been set early on.  

[al.whatmough]

I am not sure if all noticed but you can track the latest release notes for Inventor CAM here:

https://cam.autodesk.com/releases/inventor-hsm-releases/inventor-cam-2020-1-release-notes