Solidworks to Pro-E

At the moment, PTC is including their ISDX surfacing package with the ProE foundations package for $5k. That looks like a good deal. What kind of tooling do you design? Based on this, you may also find a specific module available. You need to work all of this out so that you can make a better deal, if you decide to go this route.

It usually depends on the integrity of the original file. Usually, I wind up doing a little repair work. If it becomes a major rebuilding, you may as well go back into the original package and fix the model or start from scratch in ProE.

Sometimes there can be more issues than fixes but, c'est la vie. Never remove a previous build until you know the current one is okay.

PTC has a lot of learning/reference material available on their web site. The majority can be downloaded by current maintenance customers. They also offer live (as well as pre-recorded) learning seminars on a variety of topics.

performance

John,

The base package of Wildfire 2.0 is around $4000.00, that was the quote from my last purchase at my old job 6 months ago. That includes sheetmetaland some other packages.

ISDX and Wildfire Foundation is a killer deal for $5000.00 but I think it ends on March 31 05 and ISDX is tuned for Industrial Designing.

Maintenance is aroung $1200 a year.

The bugs are very few if any that I have experienced since being on WF

2.0 for the past year. Tech support is pretty much all India now which sort of sucks but they do answer the phone more than MA. and they aren't that hard to understand.

I've been on Pro/E for over 15 years and the only bad release was

2000i2 so I just didn't use it.

HTH

Yeah, that's interesting. Catia users keep coming to this group wanting to know where the Catia support/newsgroup is. For some reason, Catia doesn't have one on Usenet. So we send them to whatever we can google. But, besides comp.cad.pro-engineer, there are several other Pro/e user resources online. There's news.ptcuser.org which is the PTC/USER email "exploder", a listserv mail distribution service which is also available a a sort of newsgroup. It is good for quick answers to 'how to' questions, when you're stuck and need it in a hurry.

Pro/e Central has some pretty active Pro/e groups, like the Exploder, broken into different groups specializing in particular Pro/e functions: Mcad Cafe has some other, broader discussion areas Engineering Tips has a forum for each major CAD software, including Pro/e:

My question back to you is what SW package did you use? If you got by with the base SW package, you'll easily get by with the more powerful and versatile PE Foundation Advantage package, for about the same price. It comes with a complete sheetmetal design/detailing package. When you start needing more specialized functionality, Pro/e has a bunch of different licensing schemes for different trades and industries, for example Plastics and Mold Making, Reverse Engineering and Inspection, Industrial Design, Manufacturing, which bundle the add-ons generally used in those specialties with Foundation Advantage. And there are often deals on these bundles for promotional purposes. One was already mentioned by Garibaldi. I think, though, that the bundles wind up being less expensive than getting the add-ons one by one. And probably maintenance would be cheaper, too. One of the things people do get upset about is that the Family Structure of Pro/e products is not stable. Lots of functionality, under competitive pressure, has been taken out of one licensing scheme and put in the basic Foundation package. So, someone now is getting rendering capabilities that users, five years ago, had to pay extra for, and still do. In many cases, this is what I'd call 'teaser' functionality, just to give the base package users a taste of what can be done with the add-ons without giving them the most useful part, such as the discussion above about Fly-Through. Some of this was moved into Foundation without giving away the most useful ability to plot a path, the automate the movement and record it. Another little catch is that you may buy the base package, not sure what extras you'll need because you're not sure what exactly you can do with the base package. Then you start, little by little, adding on. After a while, it can 'add up' to a bundle, but PTC is quite reluctant to convert licenses, especially when it means they'll lose money. So the best way is to go right from Foundation to one of the bundles, not start into the addons business.

They don't! All communication is taken care of through export files ~ IGES, STEP, Parasolid, etc. ~ which produces a dumb, featureless, non-parametric solid/surface model. We are still waiting for a feature based, parametric neutral file format that can capture and transmit this information from one package to another. So, the question becomes how well do they communicate in this lame way, through exisiting neutral file formats. As has been mentioned, there are problems. One is that they handle accuracy differently, Pro/e having a setable one, allowing fairly low accuracy when you have simple parts with big features, in other words, say a

1:5 ratio, smallest feature to overall part size, as opposed to 1:5000 in a big, thin sheetmetal part with some tiny holes. This gets more complicated when those parts with different accuracies get put into assemblies and then this needs to be translated into an absolute accuracy value, as a ratio between these accuracies. If you are doing fairly simple sheetmetal parts with a fairly high accuracy value, they should translate relatively smoothly. (I believe SW uses a more brute force method, always using a very high value for any part, no matter how simple. As a result, every value is stored as a double long word, tremendously increasing file sizes and regeneration times. As a side point, it's one of the first things you notice between Pro/e and SW files ~ just how much smaller part, assembly and drawing files are in Pro/e.)

When you buy Pro/e and pay for maintenance/support, you get a built-in kvetching structure: phone tech support from PTC, online bug reports, online enhancement request/tracking page. There's actually a ton of stuff online, directly from PTC. There are VARs who do a variety of things with Pro/e, including sell/install/teach the software and they catch some of the flack, as well. But, besides 'trapping' it before the fit hits the shan, PTC actually does some quality control type testing before releasing and it has a system of BETA testers through PTC/USER. Plus, support for Pro/e extends to PTC having designed a series of courses to teach their software. They've made training broadly available, not only by offering it themselves, at regional centers and through the VARs, but by working with community colleges and universities to get solid modelling and Pro/e training integrated into the engineering curriculum. As well, they make a conscientious attempt to recommend (certify/support) systems that they are confident will ably run Pro/e, paying particular attention to OpenGL compliant graphics cards. Pro/e runs on workstations, that's just part of the culture, so you'll never come away from any contact with the Pro/e community expecting to be able to go to Best Buy, and for a grand, get the latest games 'screamer' to run your feature based, parametric solid modeller. I've always thought that people who are not led to believe the silly and impossible are happier, less disappointed and probably do less kvetching.

Sounds good but how come when I wanted to *pay* to send two people to PTC in Shanghai, the Head Lady said, "Sorry, nope. I'm not allowed to accept students except from companies with a support contract."

Let me tell ya, that didn't seem very smart to me. There is absolutely no way that ptc is gonna make anywhere *near* the money trying to sell software here that they could make by selling training. In fact, all they are doing is cutting off their noses to spite their faces.