Large Assemblies

Andy,

I'm a Pro/e user of ~10 years and a SW user for 4+ years.

SW is slower, period.

But, it may depend on the geometry you are working with? So, what type of geometry are you working with? If it is simple prismatic forms, than SW is still slower but SW is much easier to use and that may balance the loss in performance. If you are doing top down design using surfaces, SW is a dog. (I've been doing it and SW is a PITA)

My current large assembly is only 250 parts and it loads in about 2 minutes. Now, that may not seem much but, there are about 25 linked parts and when changes are made, each rebuild is about a minute so it adds up during a day of changes, that is, about 2-3 hours a day are spent on rebiulds. Now, there are going to be people chimming in that profess they are using SW to build 10K part assemblies. Well, if you are one to wait 5-10 minutes for each change you make or each mate you add to you assembly, then you maybe happy?

Pro/e is still the better tool for large assemblies.

..

Andy, A loaded question if I ever heard one. "Real" problems often-times depend on who you ask. What follows is my opinion only, and is not meant as a slight to anyone that may be experiencing large assembly issues.

I spent 4 years working with SolidWorks designing and documenting industrial machinery composed of some 3000-4000 parts - mostly big ol' chunks of steel, sheet metal, and 80/20 aluminum extrusions (fully detailed). Load times for our largest assemblies and assembly drawings were in the neighborhood of 5 to 7 minutes fully resolved, and over the network. Rebuilds, mates, switching drawing views, inserting new parts, etc. wasn't always "instantaneous" but the waits were minimal at best. I ran a Pentium III

866MHz with 1GB RAM.

I am currently working for a company that manufactures Boom Trucks. Again, lots of steel and sheet metal. I am using a Pentium 4 2.60GHz machine with

1GB RAM. The assembly I am working on now (I just started recently) has only 481 parts and loads in 26 seconds - mates, updates, and inserting new parts happens in real time.

I do some work at home for a friend working on a kind of electrical switch. My home computer is a Dell Latitude running at just under 500MHz (all I can afford right now) and the largest assembly is 1215 parts. Fully resolved it loads in 78 seconds. The rebuilds, updates, and other CPU intensive functions cause some lag, but that would be expected with the system I run.

Obviously the computer specs have a lot to do with performance. But with your recent equipment investment, I don't see a problem with even the largest assemblies. Another opinion only - I think top-down design is overrated. A good designer or engineer can use bottom-up design just as effectively, and eliminate some of the linking/in-context problems that will occur with all parametric CAD systems.

Of course, not everyone will share my views. Your best bet is to get out and talk to some other users and see for yourself what kinds of parts/assemblies they are doing. Ask the local VAR for some references, or contact members of the local SolidWorks user group and ask them. See for yourself what SolidWorks can do before making the decision to switch. The ease-of-use, the fine reseller network, partner products, the SolidWorks community, and the company that stands behind the product are reason enough for me to recommend the move to SolidWorks.

And when you do decide to switch, I expect you will not be disappointed.

Richard Doyle

If you can spare the time and effort, you can get a free 90 day personal edition of SWX to 'kick the tires' yourself. Just try duplicating some of your current work and you will soon some to a conclusion.

Generally, SWX is slower in large assemblies, but there are some good reasons for this, IMO. SWX assemblies are not history dependant as ProE assemblies are. Thus, a lower component in the feature tree can affect the position of a higher component. If you have worked with ProE's mechanisms extension, this is similar to how all components behave in SWX. In the end, this means SWX must solve ALL assembly constraints simultaneously, unlike ProE, which can solve assembly constants 1 component at a time in a much more linear manner.

The benefit of the SWX approach is that assemblies behave more real- world-like. The downside, of course, is it takes more power to solve all those assembly constraints simultaneously. Also, constraint management in SWX can be more difficult and confusing.

Like others have said, depending on your situation, SWX's ease of use can outweigh any performance advantage ProE may have (or vice versa).

All,

please do not forget to check out the 'best practice' section of the Solidworks website. They have some excellent tips on handling large assembly models and documents.

regards, tjt

ps. the new 2004 version has addressed the large assembly issue again with some nice enhancements