CAD Systems Comparison

What have you found out searching this newsgroup so far?

What are you designing?

How many seats and any collaboration required?

looking for about 25 + seats FEA, Thermal, Flow , Structural Freq, PDM system Pluggin to a unknown MRP system looking for a solution there to.

We currently have 14 seats of SW 05 sp2. PDMworks Cosmos

We design Aircraft mounted EO sensor packages with allot of curved shapes Mass properties are extremely important due to having a balanced system collaboration is a important consideration with outside vendors

I have been lurking in this group for 2 plus years and see stuff about ProE but mostly VX and from what I have seen posted I have a bad taste in my mouth on that one

Thanks Dennis

Dennis, Start by seeking out the products built by manufacturers that exhibit the following characteristics:

"Highly capable, innovative, and enthusiastic team with common goals and values. The values held and the expectations for all team members are:

- Mutual respect and trust

- Dignity

- Pride in our Products

- Ethics, Honesty, Integrity, and Initiative

Our goal is to be a responsive, respected, value-adding team member for client programs and we are committed to this success. "

If this looks familiar, it should. It's from your own web site and is the reason your company is excellent and successful.

Everything else is just mechanics and therefore easy to evaluate with a little effort.

My own 2c here would be to get CATIA and not to fool around with the wannabees.

First of all when considering SW I would most definitely point you toward keeping CAD and CAE tools separate. I don't have a problem with SW producing the "swoopy" shapes needed for aircraft or most anything else. Salvador, Eaton, Wilson and others have gotten extremely good results out of SW in that area. I have to ask how large your assemblies may get.

In the area of interoperability with imported geometry you will probably have some concerns. SW just doesn't go the whole 100 yards in this area. But there are addins or better, standalone packages from places like Capvidia that can do an outstanding job of getting you past this hurdle.

I mentioned in the beginning standalone CAE tools. I am not a big fan of integrated tools. Documentation of models is one big issue I have. If you know FEA you know that the results are good for the geometry used at the time of analysis. It is all too easy to change the model after an FEA run and lose the geometry. For that reason I prefer products like DesignStar, Cosmos/M, NEiWorks and NE Nastran. When you do the analysis you also get a file (either text or binary) that contains the geometry you analyzed. It can be archived will little change of inadvertent changes. In addition, standalones don't tie up a seat of SW while running. I have used all the products I have just listed. Also, standalone may give you economies of networking fewer licenses.

You can't beat Nastran for modal analysis and if you go with NE/Nastran you can do structural, thermal and they even have a flow package, though I haven't used it. NE/Nastran uses the FEMAP preprocessor which is a bit antiquated, but very capable.

In addition for CFD I use CFDesigner. I have also used FloWorks, but I prefer CFDesigner and own a seat.

You will find nothing that is unbiased. It is up to you to identify a few systems to look at, and probably narrow it down to a list of 3 or 4 to actually benchmark with a comprehensive example of your product performing a complete workflow from concept to retirement of your designs, and I'm not talking about getting eval copies. I'm talking about creating a script that contains both a portion that the vendor recieves in advance of the benchmark, and a part that the vendor recieves as they are performing the benchmark. It will take some time and effort, but making the wrong decision can cost much more in the long run.

With your requirements, I would recommend

Both Intel and Catia (Dassault)are owners of impactxoft.

Best of luck!

cadman800 wrote:

This would be the bad taste I was talking about

As a matter of fact I have downloaded VX Jon but with all the crap you post here it has already clouded my judgment you by far are the worst salesman and are hurting VX's sale more than your are helping keep up the good work

Dennis

Thanks all for the useful information it will help us in deciding on or next cad package Catia and UGNX are what we are leaning toward at the moment and I will also be looking at impactxoft

since 98 plus

If Pro-e wildfire now has an interface that doen't need such a steep learning/re-learning curve as before, PLUS is faster and MORE stable than solidworks and the advanced surfaces package IS included (as per recent deal offers) ... it really would give me all I ever want in solidworks, for about the same price & maintanence.

Pro-e wins out over other similar alternatives that are (maybe) higher up the CAD ladder (VX ??, ImpactSoft) because it has a wide user and VAR base, an active user community, so native file exchange (with history/feature tree) wouldn't be a problem, and there would be people to discuss it with.

I wonder if Paul S would chip in here ?? (as he uses both SWKS & pro-E ... both 'in-anger' !)

Otherwise i have so much learning time and experience invested in Solidworks - a move to another CAD package would have to be well worthwhile......Pity solidworks is so fixed on new 'funky' features to attract new users and less on stability, and more professional features.

Recent discussion with my VAR indicated that the unhappiness with Featureitis has resulted in CEO McEleney saying publicly that core issues must be fixed up first.

I am assuming that users have hammered long and hard enough to where someone's head started hurting back at SWks corporate office.

Thus I am hoping to see some serious fixes coming down the pike.

Honestly, Catia or UG are what I'd suggest based on his comments with airplane support. Otherwise, Pro/e if a good % of his clients where using it and ATB?

..

I didn't think it was hard to pick up at all. Certainly as easy as Acad / MDT.

The ISDX deal has expired (Pro/Surface isn't anything to laugh at, tho'), currently is Mechanica Stress and Thermal, next will be ...?

The rest is subjective.

It will be interesting to see where SW decides to go. Pro/E has plunged into the mid-range market in a big way, Autodesk has decided to forego CAD and is trying to create a Leggo Assembler market, Solid Edge going for the mid to high end, everyone is working on the 2D Acad legacy holdouts, 64 bit will allow really large assembly work without going to Unix platforms (won't help those where the performance sucks), ... Interesting times ahead.

Bo,

Is thet statement in print anywhere ??????

Mark

Learning time invested in SW is invalidated about every two releases because of the incessant reorganization of the interface. So you aren't losing as much. I think one advantage of the old Pro/E "unfriendly" interface was that once learned, you didn't have to relearn it every year.

If you don't believe me, add up the pages in the 2004 and 2005 What's New. Then realize that those are just overviews and that many new pages would have to be digested just to use all the new "interface" features.

Ah! The "development" shell game. Make new toolbutton icons, shuffle the interface, add a new feature and some new bugs. (Ad$k magic show, tainted the whole market.)

That's a little "iffy" as long as WF's UI is being developed. There is a difference in that you aren't dangling waiting for the next "carrot" feature, release to release. The biggest difference, I think, is that you just have to experience the growing pains associated with revamping an interface to mature, solid foundations vs. trying to develop the foundations, patch the cracks in the walls, add rooms, ...

I ran UG back at v16 and it still leaves a bad taste - I'm a product designer who takes breaks from cad work as the projects progress and need different inputs (eg trips to far east, etc.) ... with UG there was just so much non-intuitive stuff to take in that I had to 're-learn' it everytime after a break. Catia looks good tho' grown up solidworks ?

BUT .... the Bottom line with both these for me is the cost (incl maintenence is just too high for my v small biz) . I still also think they are aimed at the full time CAD user - they have to be really, to justify their costs - and hence intuitivenes for casual users is well down the list of priorities ....... but hey, I'd love to be contradicted on this.

Maybe after all solidworks is the best of a bad bunch and what I want (intuitive interface, coupled with professional strength power and stability) will be around sometime in 2012 ;-)