Pronest vs Mastercam/Autocad - or other alternatives.

[Anonymous]

Hello,

We are a small architectural modelmaking firm, We have a very old Mastercam liscence and need to upgrade. However it seems that Mastercam has cornered the market and is ludicrously expensive, so we are looking for an alternative software.

We don't really do any CNC anymore, so its primary use for us is generating NC1 files for our Laser Cutter. 
Has anybody used Pronest? How does it compare?
Or does anybody know a CAM software that might better suit our needs? 

[rtowne72]

For our Mazak we use Fusion and edited our Post Processor to our needs.  If you utilize Inventor/HSM, the Post Processor will work as well.

If you need a Nesting software I recommend Radan. We looked to upgrade our seat of Pronest when we went to Windows 10 and they were not responsive at all.  As a result we could not have a software that was not supported well.  We then contacted Mazak to see if they had suggestions and they pointed us toward Radan.  The Rep at Radan worked with us and sold us exactly what we needed and not more than we would use considering we do not nest often.

Hope this helps.  Let us know if Radan works out.

[Frederick_Law]

3D printer.

Lots of Architect use 3D printer for model.

The price of MasterCAM might be enough for a 3D printer.

[Anonymous]

Thankyou for your reply,

We have four 3d printers currently and we send files directly to them through their respective softwares. We are looking for an alternative CAM software that can generate NC1 files so that we can send things to our laser cutters.

[Frederick_Law]

Could your laser cutter use gcode?

Some 3D printer slicer could do laser cut/engrave.