When I saw Alibre go on sale for $97 I jumped at the opportunity to move to 3D parametric design. Only after jumping did I realize that CAM tools capable of taking advantage of these new features was way out of my financial league. Then I found the modestly priced CamBam, which loads STL files (I was lucky enough to buy while Translate was still included.)
However, I soon found an even better solution than saving to STL and importing into CamBam. An equally frugal fellow at http://www.spiked3.com had found himself in the same position, and instead of fretting about it, he wrote a plugin for CamBam that directly imports geometry from Alibre!
He posted a video of how it works here: http://www.spiked3.com/ad2cb6.swf.html
I've been using it for a few weeks now and am immensely happy with how much simpler it makes going from Alibre to CAM. And on top of that, his plugin is free and can be downloaded from: http://www.spiked3.com/Bridge.html
If you tried it in the past and had problems, try it again because he has recently updated to a version that addresses most of the issues the old version had. He also has free programs for going from Alibre to photo-realistic rendering engines (the plugin and the rendering programs are also free).
I'm not associated to CamBam or Spike3.com -- just very happy with the products.
However, I soon found an even better solution than saving to STL and importing into CamBam. An equally frugal fellow at http://www.spiked3.com had found himself in the same position, and instead of fretting about it, he wrote a plugin for CamBam that directly imports geometry from Alibre!
He posted a video of how it works here: http://www.spiked3.com/ad2cb6.swf.html
I've been using it for a few weeks now and am immensely happy with how much simpler it makes going from Alibre to CAM. And on top of that, his plugin is free and can be downloaded from: http://www.spiked3.com/Bridge.html
If you tried it in the past and had problems, try it again because he has recently updated to a version that addresses most of the issues the old version had. He also has free programs for going from Alibre to photo-realistic rendering engines (the plugin and the rendering programs are also free).
I'm not associated to CamBam or Spike3.com -- just very happy with the products.
