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The Mastercam Keyboard Shortcut You DON'T Know!

3/23/21 8:00 AM / by camInstructor Mike

You won't find this keyboard shortcut in the manual! You might not even know the function it controls!


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Keyboard shortcuts in Mastercam can help speed up your workflow. This shortcut also lets you to take advantage of a setting most don't use....the Snap to Views in Dynamic Rotation.


That's a bit of a mouthful, but in short what this function allows you to do is easily snap into a view of a plane by just rotating the view close to that plane. So if you were rotating your part and it was just slightly off of the Top view, with this setting enabled, Mastercam would take your close view and automatically snap it to the exact view of the Top plane. 

Typically, this setting is turned on in the Configuration. Under the Screen>View menu item is the check box to turn this on. Once enabled, you also gain access to a setting that controls how close you have to be to a plane for Mastercam to snap to it. You can set this value between 0.5 degrees and 45 degrees, while 25 degrees is the default setting. There is also a setting below this, Motion Controller Velocity. This setting controls how fast you have to move the part to have it unsnap from the plane. Values between 0 and 1 are allowed with 0.3 being the default. 

Now, as nice as it is for your views to snap to a plane, it can be annoying if you are trying to skew the part slightly and you are near a plane, as Mastercam will snap when you really don't want it to. So, with this downfall, most leave this setting turned off. But, there is a way to use Snap to Plane without enabling it in the Configuration. 

Now comes this secret keyboard shortcut. With Snap turned off in Config, you can temporarily enable snapping by holding down the S key while rotating. This gives you the same behavior as if the setting was enabled, but only while holding down S. Keep in mind clicking S alone will not make it snap, you have to hold down S while rotating.

 


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Topics: Mastercam, Shortcut

camInstructor Mike

Written by camInstructor Mike

camInstructor Mike is Mike Wearne, an avid machinist, cnc programmer and overall connoisseur of all things machining. Mike is one of camInstructor's resident cad/cam/cnc experts and works part time at his local college teaching aspiring machinists how to program CNC Machines of all types.

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