PowerMill 2020 was released today. Over the next few weeks, you will see PowerMill 2020 availability in your account. Please check your Autodesk Account or Autodesk Desktop App to see when your entitlement is available for download.
In the meantime, you can review the Help and Release Notes to see what is being delivered in PowerMill 2020.
Thank you!
Hi @M_Hennig . Please could you send us a PM 2019 project that demonstrates the significant deterioration in collision checking that you have seen in PM 2020 - either via the forum/direct message me, or via Salesforce. Apologies if you've already done so. Thanks.
Hi @Anonymous .Just to clarify Ben's comments earlier, he was referring to our ongoing efforts to make automatic collision avoidance faster. This is not because of a decrease in speed relative to PM 2019. Rather, it is simply because we know that using automatic collision avoidance adds to the time taken to calculate toolpaths (albeit that it saves time post-calculation correcting these collisions). We are exploring ways to reduce this additional time.
The fix for the problem where PowerMill 2020 closes unexpectedly when using Toolpath Edit tab > Edit panel > Move Start Points is now available in the PowerMill 2020.0.1 update. Details on the update, including a link to the full list of issues fixed, are available in this post: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/powermill-forum/autodesk-powermill-2020-0-1-update-is-now-available-f....
Hi @Anonymous . Would it be possible to send us the project with the very slow calculation, please? We are investigating ways to improve the speed of automatic collision avoidance and it would be very useful for us to have this example and see whether our prototype solution improves the performance in this case. Thanks.
Thanks for the data @Anonymous . We'll take a look. - From the initial comment I had taken 'automatic collision avoidance' to refer to tool-tilting but from the subsequent comment and data, I think I had misunderstood and the reference was to 'automatic collision checking/verification'? (We really should name 'automatic collision avoidance' something like 'automatic tool-tilting', it would be so much clearer!)
Hi @Anonymous . Would it be possible to provide a project that demonstrates the deterioration in behaviour - ideally, one project saved in PowerMill 2017 and another saved in PowerMill 2020 that has both, with the problematic areas highlighted, e.g. by circling them via some user-defined boundaries. - I apologise for the trouble in doing so but this would be of great help in identifying the problem and tracking down what has caused the change. In trying to fix some customers' problems we can change/perturb the behaviour from that which was satisfactory on other customers' parts. - Feel free to send it via this forum or via your support agent/Salesforce, of course. Thanks.
Is it just my setup or is opening the toolpath settings page more painful in 2020 again? It seems to take longer than the 2019.2.2.2019210 version that I was running.
On the other hand, below is a time comparison of 2018/2020
Hi @bgundrum Thanks for that data. Please could you say the toolpath strategy each benchmark used, as I'd be interested to know, in your usage, where PowerMill has made the most, and least, improvement.
I'll pass on the suggestion that we take another look at the toolpath strategy form, as I agree that raising it is slower than it should be.
For this benchmark test, I ran a macro that I found on the forum a few years back. Below is a list of the toolpaths that are calculated in this macro. Attached is the macro itself and a word document that has the Echo commands from the macro.
