Why are there two MasterCAM simulators?

We have finally been getting to grips with five axis simulations using a custom machine model I build of our VM-3 and TRT-160. The main challenge was figuring out how to position the workpiece properly so considerable YouTube watching was performed on company time. That, and looking at Mastercam 2021 and 2022 itself, led to the realization that THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT SIMULATION PROGRAMS AVAILABLE!!?! Now it turns out this matters as the older one just takes your stack of workpiece and fixture and finds whatever is the bottom of that and mates it with your model origin. In my case I currently have the origin along the B-axis so it's 0.75" above the C-axis platen surface. You can get around this by creating a fake fixture that's 0.75" shorter than the real one, or I could redo the simulator model so the origin is in the C-axis platen plane. Meanwhile the newer simulator puts the workpiece WCS origin at the simulator origin, but, crucially, then allows you to offset it in X, Y and Z, so you can get it into the actual correct position.

Of course the two simulators also have other minor differences, like the old one seems to have a better optional stop, but the newer one is used to actually edit a new simulator which you can't in the old one. So other than recording this information for posterity, I wanted to ask if anyone around here knows why the hell they would be running two simulator environments and have them available at the same time? I know other programs have a little bit of this eg, Solidworks has a couple of rendering engines, but that's no where near this egregiously complicated for general use. I supposed I could ask this in the E-mastercam forums but this place is more fun, and Marcus posts here.

Check out my VM-3, TRT-160 simulator model. I'm proud of it.

One of them is the Mastercam simulator, the other is the Moduleworks simulator, they've had both for a while now, it's not new.
Both of them allow you to move the XYZ location of them.

Pick one.

rcoope said:

.... so considerable YouTube watching was performed on company time. ....

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YouTube tutorials are an invaluable tool. Haas's maintenance/repair/tips videos are linked to YouTube. Our company hired a new contract IT outfit who added YouTube to the list of blocked sites. I raised living Hell until they turned me back on.

rcoope said:

So other than recording this information for posterity, I wanted to ask if anyone around here knows why the hell they would be running two simulator environments and have them available at the same time?
View attachment 345383

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I know when I give my reason here there's gonna be quite a few posters that see what I'm saying and think I've got some sort of insider information, like maybe there's a possibility that I work for CNC software or maybe have a buddy that is there as a software development guy or something along those lines. Let me just go ahead and quash that notion right now - I have no connection at all to CNC software. I am an everyday user of Mastercam, and while my lucid, reasonable take might have you believe that there's some above and beyond reason that I'm able to have my finger on the pulse of what's happening in Connecticut, I can assure you that no such thing is happening. After years of use and seeing how things have transitioned and changed I simply have been able to really home in on how they operate.

That being said, my general thought on this is that when they first released whichever simulator came first, they were quick to discover that it licked balls. Now, licking balls is all relative for CNC software. Did they know that the first release of whichever simulator was going to lick balls? Yes. Of course they did. Upon release, however, they did quickly discover that it licked balls more frequently and harder than they thought it had licked balls during beta testing. The folks over at CNC software are nothing if not persistent though. They took fastidious notes from the user base about how badly the first simulator was licking balls and set out to make sure it got fixed, at the very worst case, within the next 8 or 9 releases. In the meantime, it was just going to be so much simpler and more efficient to include another simulator with an entirely different engine, interface and mechanics that would, at the very least, lick balls marginally less than the first simulator. Fast forward to present day and looks to me as if we're right on track here - we've got us two simulators, one that licks balls and another that licks slightly less balls (or more, depending on your circumstances), with the promise that there might be additions to make either of them slightly more fuctional (or a shitload less) in subsequent releases.

rcoope said:

We have finally been getting to grips with five axis simulations using a custom machine model I build of our VM-3 and TRT-160. The main challenge was figuring out how to position the workpiece properly so considerable YouTube watching was performed on company time. That, and looking at Mastercam 2021 and 2022 itself, led to the realization that THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT SIMULATION PROGRAMS AVAILABLE!!?! Now it turns out this matters as the older one just takes your stack of workpiece and fixture and finds whatever is the bottom of that and mates it with your model origin. In my case I currently have the origin along the B-axis so it's 0.75" above the C-axis platen surface. You can get around this by creating a fake fixture that's 0.75" shorter than the real one, or I could redo the simulator model so the origin is in the C-axis platen plane. Meanwhile the newer simulator puts the workpiece WCS origin at the simulator origin, but, crucially, then allows you to offset it in X, Y and Z, so you can get it into the actual correct position.

Of course the two simulators also have other minor differences, like the old one seems to have a better optional stop, but the newer one is used to actually edit a new simulator which you can't in the old one. So other than recording this information for posterity, I wanted to ask if anyone around here knows why the hell they would be running two simulator environments and have them available at the same time? I know other programs have a little bit of this eg, Solidworks has a couple of rendering engines, but that's no where near this egregiously complicated for general use. I supposed I could ask this in the E-mastercam forums but this place is more fun, and Marcus posts here.

Check out my VM-3, TRT-160 simulator model. I'm proud of it.

View attachment 345383

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Are they both G code based simulation or is just one of them G code simulation capable?

I am more familiar with the Moduleworks based one, which I know there are some options for getting that to run G code based. Not really familiar with the other one.

Mtndew said:

One of them is the Mastercam simulator, the other is the Moduleworks simulator, they've had both for a while now, it's not new.
Both of them allow you to move the XYZ location of them.

Pick one.

Click to expand...

Mtndew can you tell me how to do this in the MasterCAM simulator? I cannot for the life of me figure out how to move the workpiece like you can in Machine Simulator setup.

dodgin said:

That being said, my general thought on this is that when they first released whichever simulator came first, they were quick to discover that it licked balls. Now, licking balls is all relative for CNC software. Did they know that the first release of whichever simulator was going to lick balls? Yes. Of course they did. Upon release, however, they did quickly discover that it licked balls more frequently and harder than they thought it had licked balls during beta testing. The folks over at CNC software are nothing if not persistent though. They took fastidious notes from the user base about how badly the first simulator was licking balls and set out to make sure it got fixed, at the very worst case, within the next 8 or 9 releases. In the meantime, it was just going to be so much simpler and more efficient to include another simulator with an entirely different engine, interface and mechanics that would, at the very least, lick balls marginally less than the first simulator. Fast forward to present day and looks to me as if we're right on track here - we've got us two simulators, one that licks balls and another that licks slightly less balls (or more, depending on your circumstances), with the promise that there might be additions to make either of them slightly more fuctional (or a shitload less) in subsequent releases.

Click to expand...

This is better than my theory which is that there were two team leads, let's call them Ed and Gary, and Gary's team ended up making a new simulator since they thought they could do better than Ed's team and then management was too spineless to pick one or force them to combine the best features and only have one, so they just had a lot of super awkward meetings and cringy silences which now happen on Zoom. This is why Steve Jobs was a billionaire and the rest of us are not. He cared a lot about the user experience. Depp down I think that MasterCAM is actually too spineless with their customers, and hold on to too much legacy interfaces and tools with the result that there are at least two ways to do absolutely everything, and sometimes four. They also don't have a very good hierarchy of features, so functions that in reality you rarely need, like changing the color of some solid, always seem to be front and center.

rcoope said:

Mtndew can you tell me how to do this in the MasterCAM simulator? I cannot for the life of me figure out how to move the workpiece like you can in Machine Simulator setup.

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Click on the gear icon next to the G1
Click on the Simulation tab
In the Position box, change the dropdown from "Automatic" to "Translation in XYZ"
Enter different XYZ values

Viola!

There are two simulators because there are different options in the MW one such as the ability to build a machine and use a post. Mastercam added this MW simulator not only for the extra functionality but since they are already so deep in licensing with the 5x toolpaths I'm sure this was a fairly cheap add. No, two teams didn't go out and accidentally build the same functionality at the same time.

The MW sim, no, it doesn't create gcode and simulate it, but the post is still driving the sim motion. Too many people have this notion that a sim must use gcode in order to be accurate without realizing the software is still interpreting that gcode and concocting machine motion from it. Yes, software like Vericut do more than just simulate 'gcode' so I'm not saying MW sim is better than Vericut, but you won't see much difference between the machine motion in the two. Now a MW sim that is not post driven, that's a different story.

I would expect to see the MW sim fully integrated into the default sim interface sometime soon.

Mtndew said:

Click on the gear icon next to the G1
Click on the Simulation tab
In the Position box, change the dropdown from "Automatic" to "Translation in XYZ"
Enter different XYZ values

Viola!

Click to expand...

Sorry Mtndew I wasn't clear about which one we couldn't figure out. It's the MasterCAM simulator rather than the Machine Simulator where we can't move the workpiece.

When you click on the toolpath menu icon you (we) get the MasterCAM simulator though knowing MasterCAM I bet this is something you can configure! In that setup options dialog you can move the stock around but seemingly not the workpiece. I think if I can't figure this out, and now it's a matter of principle, I'll just modify our simulator so the origin is in the plane of the C-axis platen. It seems clever to have it in the centres of both rotations, what we call the iso-center in medical physics, but I don't think the simulator cares. By the way, the nice thing about having two people thinking about this is while I was nattering at you guys, our toolmaker was getting it done. Check out this video of what is our first really serious simultaneous five axis job. This was with a two flute Coromill 316 cutter and it's a bit chattery here and there but apparently it cleaned up super nice with a four flute on the finish pass.

rcoope said:

Sorry Mtndew I wasn't clear about which one we couldn't figure out. It's the MasterCAM simulator rather than the Machine Simulator where we can't move the workpiece.
View attachment 345524
When you click on the toolpath menu icon you (we) get the MasterCAM simulator though knowing MasterCAM I bet this is something you can configure! In that setup options dialog you can move the stock around but seemingly not the workpiece. I think if I can't figure this out, and now it's a matter of principle, I'll just modify our simulator so the origin is in the plane of the C-axis platen. It seems clever to have it in the centres of both rotations, what we call the iso-center in medical physics, but I don't think the simulator cares. By the way, the nice thing about having two people thinking about this is while I was nattering at you guys, our toolmaker was getting it done. Check out this video of what is our first really serious simultaneous five axis job. This was with a two flute Coromill 316 cutter and it's a bit chattery here and there but apparently it cleaned up super nice with a four flute on the finish pass.

Click to expand...

Click on that Simulation tab, set position to "Translate in XYZ" then enter the values you want.
It's the same as the other simulator, just in a different tab.

Got it MtnDew, thanks! I have to say that was not obvious. I guess why it's there is you're not actually moving your vise/workpiece assembly origin, you're moving the simulator origin. If you think about it that way then the dialog box makes sense.