Re: Dassault Systems

Hi Jerry, Looking at the demo of subsurfs it seemed to me that I may be able to create in a couple of hours what would take me all day in SW messing around with planes and splines....waiting for rebuilds....repairing the failed bits and unexpected consequences...SW seems unnecessarily obtuse...the wrong sort of engine under the hood for swoopy designs...I have noticed asymmetric forms emerging now in the local marketplace... If Catia was more productive by a factor of 3 in creating the basic forms with this approach it wouldn't matter so much about the up front price differential. I guess you have looked at migration requirements? what is your impression of how intuitive will it be for a well healed SW user to come up to speed with Catia? thanks neil

I went to a demo of a new product called Impactxoft

I am not being anti SW but I am a firm believer in the right tool for the right job.

Cheers

Merry:-)

thanks for the link Merry, I tried to view the demos but they ran slowly even over 1mbit/s line....argh! the subsurfs ability seems to be the same thing as advertised for Catia. so how about it SW? next request for ID people....subsurfs. :o)

Looks very interesting. Anyone have any idea about costs?

'Sporky'

Merry Owen wrote:

Mark

I had a call from their Europe distributor yesterday - it's 5000 euros per year for the suite. There is no up front fee.

Seems a bit steep but he is sending me a demo cd so I'll let you know

Regards

Jonathan

interesting, I was given a price for IXstyle from Aust distributor that works out about $50,000 NZD up front plus maint subscription , or alternatively an ann. fee you mention....this makes it approx 9x cost of basic SW locally....

: ( oh well....

sorry that's 6x

He did seem a little vague on the price, and after he said 5000 euros I did not really feel there was much room for negotiation - it's too expensive for me, however I got the impression that the software is being targeted at those who want a cheaper version of Catia , rather than a more expensive SW. The salesman was under the impression that it was the same price as SW so I explained that SW was approx 4000 pounds to buy and was not a yearly charge.

I believe it is an American programme so they have probably just swapped the dollar sign for the Euro or pound sign. This was just about economic in the past but in the current exchange rate it is madness. No exports will be acheived. With America needing to export as much as possible to counter their imports, things like software should be leading the way because they can be easily sold at the domestic dollar price without to much difficulty.

As an aside - at the current US/UK exchange rate , are any toolmakers/moulders in the US getting any orders from the UK? Specially in low volume runs.

Regards

Jonathan

Could be what you got was a demonstration of the drivers' attitude / aptitude? I'm still, very much, learning Pro/E and have no exposure to Catia, little exposure to SW to put things in perspective, but I'd venture an uneducated guess that unless you need automotive body styling surface quality or heavy duty mfg integration you don't need 30K worth of Catia. I could also be grossly underestimating your needs, too. Anyway, if you can make the problems available, sometime in the next few weeks I'd be happy to give them a learning experience whirl and either throw my hands up in despair or get back to you. Another thought; if you can go public with the data sets, posting to McadCentral or another (?) multi - group site might stir some cross platform interest (I have no idea what their attachment limits are). Good luck with the endeavor....

Neil,

Sorry to be so slow to respond. Things are pretty hectic at work and I haven't checked on the news group in more than a week.

This was our impression. The subdivided surfaces are, I'm pretty sure, part of the Imagine and Shape module. The fellow from Catia who showed it to us was able to approximate our Recon main case, battery and cap shapes in literally a few minutes. It would, no doubt, take considerably longer to dial it in really tight, but it took us months in SolidWorks.

Exactly. Which is why we are probably going to make the move. Catia is still at the top of our list, although we finally got a better web demo of NX3 and feel that it can also do what we need. The NX3 user interface is better than NX2, but still seems to require more clicks than Catia to do the same stuff. If we compare Catia and NX3 systems with similar capability (Catia Hybrid Design, without Imagine and Shape, Freestyle Sketch Tracer and Functional Modeling), the prices after haggling are pretty comparable.

We have only had demonstrations and haven't played with the UI ourselves, but it looks like we could pick it up pretty quickly. The VAR says that the people coming from SW are the quickest to learn in their training classes.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Actually, it started out several years ago as a stand alone. Dassault bought the rights (non-excluxive, since ImpactXoft is selling it by itself) a year or so ago and now offer it as their Functional Modeling module in Catia. It also seems to be the technology behind the similar, but apparently more limited, capability in SW05.

The Functional Modeling module for Catia does seem to be very powerful.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

I don't know what ImpactXoft wants, but the Functional Modeling module for Catia lists for $4K.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Most definitely, the attitude and aptitude of the driver is a critical factor in how the demonstration goes. The fellow who first showed us NX2 and NX3 was a local user who was not familiar with the type of work we do. He was definitely swimming in too deep water. We finally got a web demo by someone who did a lot of work like ours and could see what the software could actually do. The NX3 interface is better than NX2, but it still seems to require a lot of mouse clicks. It also seems to be organized in a somewhat confusing manner. Even the second demonstrator spent a fair amount of time looking for functions in menus, sometimes for functions he said he used "all the time".

The Pro/E demo was also over the web. PTC didn't appear to put much effort into it. They've been very slow to respond to us and seem more interested in making excuses than making good parts.

The Catia people were extremely capable and thoroughly professional.

If we can't get the sales people commited to getting our business, how much commitment are we going to get after the sale?

It's robustness that we are looking for. SolidWorks just doesn't seem to be working out well for us. We spend too much time fixing things that break when we make seemingly unrelated changes. The problems seem to go back to the quality of the surfaces that we start with. Catia seems to build much higher quality surfaces.

Anyway, if you can

I'm afraid we can't do that. The problem parts we are using are from existing and not-yet-released products. Our managers require non-disclosure agreements before we can give them out. It's also too late. We are going to be making up our mind this week, or possibly next.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

We did look into ShapeWorks, SurfaceWorks and GeometryWorks. We felt that ShapeWorks didn't give us the kind of control we needed where surfaces meet (curvature continuity, typically). As I recall, both SurfaceWorks and GeometryWorks gave us that kind of control. SurfaceWorks had a rather difficult user interface and was quite expensive (though much cheaper than switching to Catia!). GeometryWorks seemed to be the best match to us. We decided against GeometryWorks because we felt that a lot of our problems came from downstream operations (shelling, fillets, all of the normal joys of making a real part from a surface) and it wasn't clear that changing the way we built the surfaces in SolidWorks would help. Perhaps we were wrong.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"