I saw SW 2004 today...

I feel your pain. We're going thru the same problems. Right now our in-house "customized" 2D AutoCad is the winner ovwe SolidWorks.

I would vote for less features and better performance (especially on common tasks) any day of the week.

Ken

What I'm starting to realise is that IN CERTAIN AREAS of the software, the more bells and whistles they add, the more the user seems to have to retrench back to simpler, more fundamental function.

Rightly or wrongly, I'm finding now that when I use (even the simplest) in-context features in a family of subassemblies, the problems of getting part updates to flow through a configuration tree can be a killer. The need (which seems more acute than ever in the past) to open all the relevant parts and assemblies, ensure they all show the appropriate configuration, then force the rebuild of each, sometimes more than once, in order to propagate the updates, often renders the whole procedure not viable. Especially, (harking back to your performance issue) when rebuild times for each assembly are measured in minutes.

It is sometimes much simpler, faster and better, in such a situation, to simply create and oversee the relations manually.

My favourite feature in 2003? the reference triad thingy

Cosmos Express for free: WAY cool

Multibodies and boolean ops: Pretty damn cool

Just now, can't think of anything else I'd really miss, and my productivity is still well down vs 2001+ SP6, simply due to reliability being so intermittent, as well as the performance hit and insatiable hunger for resources.

Extrapolating from the resource costs of the bells and whistles added in

2003, it seems likely that my new Dell M50 will not be able to cope with big assemblies in 2004, due to "only" being able address 1 GB. This means that the cost of ownership just got even higher. I used to be able to survive two or three major SldWks version changes on one hardware platform.

If SldWks would just keep working on 2003, making it faster, simpler, more elegant and more reliable, they would have virtually unlimited access to my loyalty and my wallet.

As things are going, both of these are likely to close ever tighter, as I drown in frigging bells and am deafened by bleeding whistles, and pay SolidWorks almost as much for the privelege as I pay the taxman.

"Comparing SolidWorks 2003 to Inventor 6 at a solid modeling level, Inventor looks to be an early winner. I won't list the reasons why."

Because you can't... No thin feature, no mirror body, no drag witness lines on dims to change design intent, poor filleting, no advanced lofting, no

2D - 3D, no booleans, no local body operations, No scale feature, No top down assembly design, no top down weldments, no assembly configurations, no smart fasteners, no physical dynamics, no physical simulation, TEN TIMES SLOWER THAN SOLIDWORKS WITH LARGE ASSEMBLIES, no dynamic collision detection, cannot dimension between parts in an asssembly, no cavity command, I could go on but I am bored of typing.

BTW when you create a drawing view with IV you get an unprintable placeholder, when you accept the view, you get another temporary graphic that looks like it is resolved, check your task manager however and you will see your processor pegged at 100% until IV has resolved all the hidden lines etc... if it ever does. then you might be able to print a drawing.

Dont think about it, go with inventor. you know it makes sense.

OK everyone else...sell your shares in celerity group NOW...

Well Ken I've been an Autodude in the past.

I've just produced 95 manufacturing drawings with very detailed GAs in 5 days on a 2000 part job that took 3 weeks to design and model with an old P600 running SWX 2003.

Sometimes it was slow making all those section views and details and inserting fasteners, but there's no way my old customized Acad could even come close.

I'm a freelancer. The more folks who stay on Acad, the better for me. Stick with what you've got.

bob z. hates that little triad thingy. let's look more like autocrash - yes, autocrash. autocrash is indeed the correct spelling.

Of course you know that you can turn that little thingy off...

p.s. - I haven't heard from Joan yet

yes, you can. bob z. did right away. bob z. doesn't need anything else to distract. he lacks focus. focus, focus, focus! :~)>

let us figure out what we can do about this Joan issue. maybe there is a consolation prize that we can offer...

Ouch!

Even Joe didn't get this much trouble from us...

Hmm

1. A derived part is not a mirrored body, it is a new part that has to be inserted into the original part. This is not a mirrored body, a one step operation within one part.

1. Can you use guide curves in a loft now? that is advanced lofting and if they have just added it in version 6, what has been the hold up, this is basic required functionality for a production ready piece of software.

2. not crap there is no meaningful 2D-3D you have to go through so many steps and the thing is so limited that is is easier to model it in 3d from the start.

1. I am talking about true booleans subtract this body from that body, make a body from where these 2 bodies intersect. derived parts, derived assemblies, seems like IV is just derived itself.

2. More derived nonsense.

1. Adesk themselves say the do not do top down design, rather they have the "adaptive engine" (which is a bunch of macros) and dosen't work too well circular references which part is driving and which part is driven.

2. Solidworks had smart fasteners first, smart being the ability to drag a part into an assembly and have it snap into place with 3 mates without having to manually reference edges /faces etc... or apply special references to the geometry to make it intelligent.

1. No, this functionality is only available thru animation not just dragging parts around and detecting collision dynamically using stop at collision and dynamic clearance.

2. name one

1. can you? thats new then ok i will give you that one, is it parametric, does it update when you move a part?

2. ahh no comment on the drawing performance then.

Well I know the former well enough to be CSWP, the latter I know as much as I need to know to advise people to not base their companies future on a piece of software that isn't very robust yet. I also know that you need to be smart to use IV. You need to be smart to use it not to choose it, because to use it you need to be smart enough to figure out all the workarounds needed to get the job done.

Guys SW and IV are NOT a religon it is a tool, unless of course you are a Reseller.

By the way I bet may dad can beat up yours. :-)

configurations,

slightly different question:

has SW fixed that problem where after certain operations all your buttons (including save, open, etc) become disabled yet in SW2003 or SW2004?

One I think of off the top of my head is RMB->View mates--->then edit a mate, and hit ok. All (nearly) your buttons are greyed out and can only be made active again by clicking somewhere in the viewport window.

--nick e.

I'll take it that's a "no" then?

SWuser quipped:

I thought the correct spelling was "autocrap"?

Yeah, me too. I was struck by how serious the messages were and by the sheer number of them. Those people really had some major venting to do.

Mike

All I can say after reading some 30+ replies is,.. "Tear Gas and Crowd Control".

That thread has some major angst flowing in it!!

Even some of the nicer guys there are not sharing happy camper stories.

..

makes this group look quite contented in comparison doesn't it....who needs Stormtrooper skirmishes to break the monotony when you can do battle with the whole product- serious stuff : )

Mike,

From the content, it looks like Ade$k is trying to bitch slap them and bend them over. They've done this so many times before, it's amazing to me how many people have stuck with them. Even if they reverse their position they'll still lose. Who would want to do business with a company like that. Kinda like dealing with the Mafia.

Mark

I don't think you have your facts straight. At even a cursory look, I can tell you that many of the things you listed do exist. Some of the techniques change between programs, but the end result is the similar. I really could care less. When I work for you, I'll look for the features I need to make your stuff. I didn't want to make feature-to-feature comparisons, because it's not SolidWorks' features that are a problem, it's the performance.

There are some areas that would cause a work around in Inventor, but you could say that SolidWorks causes people to work around some things that Inventor has built in. I wanted to know if I could be competitive any longer with SolidWorks. It's not that there aren't some concerns with Inventor, we are looking into these now.

Todd

Here's what I see: A lot of questions, a lot of answers. Some people are hot. Looks like any other discussion group. I like the fact that AutoDesk people run the group and often answer questions directly. I hate the fact that AutoDesk runs the group and some posts are blocked.

Still, the questions/comments that get blocked aren't blocked because they have a problem with Inventor. I had one blocked because I flamed SolidWorks. They discourage most flaming. Like it or not.

Todd