Just back from the show - glad I went, but didn't feel as busy as 2001 - probably because the NEC hall is huge relative to the motorcycle museum! No sign of VX, Think3, Catia or NX and both Pro Eng and Autodesk outgunned Solidworks on the demo and "showing off" front - Solidedge seemed very marginalised compared with last time, but with good tech support and real question answering backup.
The rapid prototyping stuff was good to see - oh for the money to have some of those toys to play with! Good talk from Virtalis about use of VR for product design and testing - actually showing industry based stuff that looked useful - I liked the VR backhoe demo - looked like fun.... All in all, makes you realise that 3D mechanical CAD is a relatively small workd really! Anyone else have any thoughts? Cheers Deri
Jonathan To be honest, I didn't manage to get down to the details with either the main Solidworks stand or NT CADCAM. The main stand seemed to revolve around getting 2D users hooked (same as the Autodesk / PTC stands) by doing lots of staged demo's - you know the sort - look how easy it is to add bolts/holes/widgets/small twidly things..... and the drawings automatically upgrade......no more remembering whether you've updated all the details......cool 2D drawings and twiddly models to show your boss......Yeay! Everyone shell out! I do wonder whether Dassualt see Solidworks as beginners 3D and expect people who want to do "real" engineering to move up to CATIA. This seemed to be the case with Solidedge and NX.... NT had the Radical SR race day car on the stand and loads of video footage about how it was designed in Solidworks - lots of noise, high revs and a cool engine sitting there (not as good as their free coffee and beer bar of old!) - built from two Hiabusa Motorbike engines back to back it turned out 350+HP. The designer was there, but he was more interested in the engine and car than the software to be honest (sensible chap!) and by that time my head was fried, so I forgot my hard hitting queries! Anyway, no doubt there will be a big article in MCAD - I noticed Al Dean wandering about. Cheers Deri
Just got back today, Solid Solutions had a great stand, eight PC stations, plasma screens and running tutorials all day too, with very good Solidworks guys there, and their MD.
NT Cadcam, one PC Station, one naff formula 1 car, taking most of their stand. two guys. I never got a chance to talk to them, as they were swamped, even by one person!
Now NTCadcam is my Var, but I ended up on the Solid Solutions stand, where they helped solve four out of five problems, ( one I had had since 2003), I was having with Solidworks, even though I had told them that NTCadcam is my var, lol. A very special thanks to them, their technical knowledge is very impressive.
VX was there, with their latest version, running on a PIII, which looked and ran great, I threw a design problem at them, but VX had the same problem as Solidworks with it, though they did promise to look at it. The guys were a great laugh, with high technical standards. With them coming from Wales, there was lots of banter and sheep jokes. :-) barrrh! Sending a 30 day cd out to me.
SolidEdge was there also, but I did not have the time for a demo, but they are sending a 30 day cd out to me.
NVidia were there, and they were very honest, with lots of very good useful information. An impressive HP workstation with 2x FX4400 in SLI combination! Blistering, Wow! I want one of them, lol
Wildcat was there, but the graphics boards were huge! They did offer to give a time trial of their cards though.
I steered clear of Autodesk, (might be too tempted to go back), not! lol
The rapid prototyping was a real eye opener, At £37,500, for a tiny machine, they are a bit too expensive for me.
Adobe Acrobat was there with two, "dolly birds", bad impression in my eyes, but I did read about their latest offering, Adobe engineering, this looks like it will be a winner.
Might be just me, but the show seemed very small, I gave myself two days, but only used one of them.
The only smaller show I have been too, is the, "what's it is like to be a recluse" show, lol
All in all, a great show, worth going too, but needs more work, on getting more exhibitioners. More effort, on NTCadcam's part, would not go a miss too.
Pete Which stand were VX on? I didn't see them at all, which is a shame as I'd liked to have seen how their getting on... and being a welshman, less sheep jokes! I know what you mean about the NVIDIA stand - there were some seriously large monitors kicking about. Cheers Deri
I'm amazed you filled a whole day Pete, we were done by lunchtime! To be fair, we were only looking at data management stuff and we're not in the market for any new CAD software as yet.
I dunno what you guys think, but I don't find the whole "put a fast car on the stand and they will come" concept all that appealing anymore. I noticed that MSC didn't bother this year with the F1 car (I seem to remember that they always used to have one...) I guess most of us are designing far more mundane things...;-)
I also found one of the SW sales guys to be overly pushy, especially as he wasn't connected with our own VAR. As soon as I mentioned PDM, he went off on a Smarteam pitch. Now we looked at Smarteam last year and decided it was a) Too expensive and b) more functionality than we really needed. So I tell this guy we're not interested and he them starts slagging our VAR off saying that they obviously didn't demonstrate ST properly!
I think Deri is right aswell - more and more these shows seem to be about getting the 2D crowd into 3D. I only really noticed the SW demo and it was just as Deri said - "Ooh, look how I can import and use my legacy ACAD data...". Anyone who wants CAD has got it these days, in one flavour or another, the only money seems to be in "assimilating" the 2D people into the 3D world.
All in all, not a bad show - we got what we wanted (now for the deluge of junk mail/phone calls/spam etc LOL!)
BTW Deri, VX was on the Integrated Data Systems stand (across from the ABAQUS stand).
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