Re: Take a look,,, Sprutcam/ Deskproto

Message: 5
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 21:19:38 -0000
From: "vrsculptor" <vrsculptor@...>
Subject: Re: Take a look,,, Sprutcam/ Deskproto

> If you like sprutcam, you will love deskproto.
> www.deskproto.com

Robert,
I've played with deskproto in tha past and it is a very nice program
that works as advertised. For small items deskproto is great. For
larger items the deskproto takes too much time doing passes of the
entire surfaces and cutting air.

[The new version of DeskProto has a "skip ambient" feature that eliminates a
lot of unecessary cutting. It also has more advanced segmenting features
that allow you to concentrate on the areas you're interested in.]

Your control of the process is very
limited. With industrial strength CAM packages you can specify many
different strategies. You can pick waterline cutting to cut all the
flat surfaces in one pass then pick other strategies to just cut what
is remaining.

[It's true that DeskProto hasn't implemented waterline cutting yet (although
it does have spiral in, spiral out, parallel and crosswise, plus several 4th
axis routines). But STLWork offers that, and you could get both packages a
few times over for the cost of any of these high-end packages, even
including Sprut, which is relatively reasonable.]

All this optimization comes at the cost of complexity. What I'm
amazed at is how much easier the higher end packages are getting to
use (not Mastercam!). I think the advantages that the point and shoot
CAM programs like Deskproto, Millwizard and Stlwork had over the more
complex programs is just about gone.

[Well, for some of us, price is still a thing we have to consider...]

More than my 2 cents....

Roger

[More than my 2 thousand bucks...]

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com