Just found this Forum... Glad to see that people still have hope in
Solidworks. The techsupport people send me E Drawings for dummies ; )
I've been using Solidworks at work for a year now (not by choice). And
I have to tell y'a if I had been givin the choice we would be running
ProE instead of that low end package. Don't get me wrong Solid works
is great for drawing pretty pictures and all. But to get actual work
done. Pffffff... The 2005 version can't even do a cross section
without the hatching. Telling you lots of fudging lot of waiting but
certainly no performance. I'm going back to CAD. XYZ here I come...
Cheers!
M.Design
I've been using SW for eight years and couldn't agree more. It's STILL
slow and creates crap drawings. I happen to be in a bad mood right now
because of crawling solidworks.
Sounds more like competitor VARs trying to start stuff.......maybe
they are in a head to head with solidworks at some company and are
about to lose the sale. Post some negative stuff here and then point
to it.
As for cross hatch...select it...then select "None" in the property
manager.
The 2005 version can't even do a cross section
If you're going to slam SW, come up w/ something more credible. There
are multiple ways to turn off or hide hatching.
I've gotten plenty of "actual work" done with SW. I've also done
plenty with Pro/E and UG. You don't make a convincing case that SW is
the source of your problem.
I can understand why you are PO'd, having never learned how to use it
properly after 8 years. That must really be a bum feeling. Slow? If
you are too slow, you can always go to a CAD appl which runs on high
end workstations or mainframes. Why wait 8 years?
There simply wouldn't be 600,000 customers of SolidWorks if good
productive work could not be done, and no 3rd Party Developers would
waste their time if SolidWorks was not useful.
Well, it is obvious someone wants to stir the pot annonymously.
semmlerclan.com just points to Google Canada.
Bo
I'm hardly anonymous and I assure you I know how to use SW. I have
used it full time for the eight years creating REAL machine drawings.
Ie. 8000 parts or more assemblies, thousands of drawings, weldments,
machining drawings and more. I worked for a VAR for some time teaching
and doing demos, I have my CSWP and was a certified instructor and
tech support. I've probably forgotten more about SW than you'll know.
The fact is SW still has many of the same problems it has for years,
for example hiding edges in drawings works like crap. Changing line
weights in drawings works like crap. Creating views of cast parts that
have all kinds of convoluted shapes and tangent edges is painful.
Added to that SW is SLOW. It is brutally slow with large assemblies
and even worse with those parts/assemblies' drawings.
SW doesn't crash as much as it used to but aside from that there are
minimal advances. For instance they added weldments some time ago.
Unfortunately you can't add a weld bead unless the parts are touching
which, if you had half a clue, you would know that in real world
weldments the parts are NOT touching, there's clearance. I also can't
add weld beads between irregular shapes. The weldment cut list and
it's corresponding balloons continue to be buggy (at least in SW 06
which I'm using right now).
I could go on and on but am not interested in trying to educate you in
the limitations of SW. The truth is I am as frustrated as ever with it
because it is grindingly slow with large assemblies. I have colleagues
using ProE who do not have the same problems and appear to be more
satisfied with SW than I. I also can't say I have ANY colleagues that
aren't disappointed daily with SW.
There are a lot more than 600,000 people driving a Kia but that
doesn't make it a good car.
If I had to do 6000+ part assemblies with weldments done right, then
I, too, would probably pick a higher end tool for the job, and
wouldn't blame anyone else for picking the best tool for the job.
Hi Devlin,
you may know a lot about Solidworks but you dont know much about
the Kia line of automobiles. They beat N American cars hands dowm
with a 5 year warranty, better quality and all the extras.
Kia is a subsidiary of Hyundai, excellent value for money.
600,000 people DO know what they are doing!!!
----------------------------------------------
Posted with NewsLeecher v1.0 Final
* Binary Usenet Leeching Made Easy
*
lol... I knew a topic like that would start Great conversations.
Thruth is I'm no salesman trying to bash SW. I'm just a poor old Pre-
Cad Tech user that converted to SW a year ago. I totally agree with
Devlin's comment of the slow (parts/assemblies' drawings). Has for the
hatching... Selecting none in the property manager doesn't do a thing
(at least not with the 2006 SP2.1version). I don't think I need to
get all techinical to say that SW suck's the work I do is mostly very
basic stuff. Parts, assm, dwgs... But if the program can't even select
a line to put a dimension on without giving me a fuss... Not that's
not very efficient is it?
Still wouln'd buy a Kia...
Cheers!
wrote
A better argument might be that there are supposedly 2million+ users of
Autocad/MDesktop, and that certainly doesn't make it a good package!
I think Solidworks has got where it has by:-
a) Having a name that everyone could remember, which helped greatly with
marketing (compared with UGS Unigraphics or SDRC I-DEAS)
b) It was greatly cheaper than the competition when it appeared
c) It's now achieved a marketing critical mass where everyone's heard of it,
everyone's heard that "600,000 people use it" and so managers who know
bugger all about 3D CAD systems feel confident to buy it - this is the
position Autocad reached many years ago.
d) Many of the licenses are virtually given away to students and educational
establishments
e) It's an OK product but with probably as many flaws as strengths.
I was relishing the prospect of learning to use it when I started my present
job 18months ago, but I have to say although I'm occasionally pleasantly
surprised by what it can do, I'm also endlessly disappointed by its
unreliability and poor attention to detail.
John H
"Slow" is a relative term, and I've been designing parts for over 30
years, over 20 on CAD. The 68040 Macs may have been slow, but I got
good 2D work done on them in the late 80s. It was a good tool for my
jobs. I've done assemblies with 5-6 dozen parts where every part is
rounded-conical and assemblies start to slow down, but SWks is good
for the job, and that is on a 1.7Ghz M60 laptop or my MacBook Pro.
I've never had to use techniques with SWks to allow me to work with
larger assemblies, but I know I've listened to more experienced SWks
users discuss it on this Newsgroup as to techniques to make it work
better, and some users here have put up papers on working with large
assemblies. Still, if I got boxed down on speed, I'ld upgrade
hardware quickly (the new Intel processors are almost here). Hardware
includes the PC its accessories (& crapware in the OS that must be
removed or zapped), the network, the server, and its software.
If Swks would not cut it for large assemblies with good hardware and
best large assembly techniques, I would simply pick a better tool, pay
for it and learn it. CAD programs are just another tool. I wouldn't
pick a Bridgeport mill to make an injection mold cavity in this day
and age, and I wouldn't pick a knee mill with a CNC add-on to do hard
SS milling, as it is the wrong tool for the job.
"Fuss" is sort of relative, too. I've never had trouble dimensioning
my simpler parts either in the solids or in drawings, & frankly don't
remember hearing about not being able to select a line to dimension on
this group, but I could have just passed it by. I assume that if
there is a situation about dimensioning a line that is common, various
people reported it and others are working on fixing it. What type of
line gives a "Fuss"?
So let's look at these nebulous terms "slow" and "fuss" and see what
options exist to deal with them. There may be some answers
hereabouts.
Bo
hehe not really :-)
just a happy owner of a fine Kia family automobile.
----------------------------------------------
Posted with NewsLeecher v1.0 Final
* Binary Usenet Leeching Made Easy
*
Thanks for your feedback guys. Now that I have your attention ; )
Here's the whole story...
(Posted by Andr=E9.)
Here's my situation:
We design and build Kiosks. Our sales department designs "dummy"
models in solidworks and then exports it to get rendered for the
client to approve, and that usually works out fine. The models are
fully solid, only surface details, etc.
When it comes to actually building the unit though, we've been unsure
how to proceed. The shop used to use Autocad and it would take a week
to update any kind of details for the shop drawings. About a year
ago,
they decided to "get with the times" and get a solid modeller.
Solidworks (basic version) was what was chosen at the time (pro-e is
still a little pricey, and the designer had bad experiences with
Inventor). Having a solid model driving the drawings would make
updating a breeze, or so we thought.
When it comes time to actually model a unit though, it seems to be
more complicated than we anticipated. They are made of wood primarily
(plywood, etc), with metal accessories (handles, slides, hinges,
etc).
Our first project was done as an assembly, with each panel of wood a
seperate part, but the assembly started to get overly complicated
REALLY quickly. Our project folders were immense, for what seemed
like
a simple product. For our drawings, we typically have to show a fully
assemebled unit, cross sections, indicating the panel ID's to
reference a cut-list. Sometimes drawer front or something would be
shown individually. As an assembly, it wasn't too hard to put
together
the required assemblies to insert into our drawing package, but the
actual design time was much longer than intended.
We then tried doing a welded assembly. This greatly sped up design
time, not having to name each part individually, deal with mates,
etc.
We could model a whole unit in a day or two. But then came the tricky
part: doing the drawings. Cross sections were 'ok' (semmed a little
slow to work with though). But when it came time to show only a few
of
the solid bodies as a seperate "assembly" in the drawing package,
were
we unsure of the best way to seperate that from the original welded
assembly. We originally selected the individual bodies, then selected
'insert into new part', and while thats fine as-is, we often found
ourselves wanting to add or remove a body from that 'export' we just
did, so as to still stay parametric to the original welded assembly,
but we couldn';t accomplish this without deleting it and basiacally
starting over; losing all the work we had done in the drawing. We
also
considered configurations, but that ended up being terribly slow,
seeming like it loaded thw whole assembly each time we wanted to do a
view, and it ended up taking 30+ seconds to switch pages in our
drawing package.
Basically we're at a loss, everything seems too slow and clunky to
work like we would want to. Our computers are by no means slow, 2
gigs
of ram, dual core intel bla bla..
Does anyone else have experience building and detailing assemblies of
this sort? what would you suggest? How would you go about building it
from the ground up? welded assembly? plain old assembly modeling?
configurations? etc? Anything suggestion that could help speed this
process up would help, and our VAR doesn't seem to be much help. If
you work with large assemblies, what tricks do you use to keep your
software running smoothly? opening a drawing package right now takes
ages, let along switching pages, it's getting quite irritating.
I had previously used solidworks in a machine shop for years and had
honestly no complaints, since i really wasn't working with large
assemblies, i was mostly dealing with sometimes complex, single
models
to be machined on CNC, quite a different world i tell ya!
Thanks!
Andr=E9 Richard
The idiot that suggested Solidworks.
Geeeezzzzz you guys are to much!
Take away the cad system (any one) and replace it with a pencil/eraser
and drafting table.
Then tell me how much it sucks.
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:
I know there are a number of users who do large assemblies who will
answer questions in this group, and some of them are consultants who
help with planning implementation of SolidWorks and training, and one
of those may be a great help if you were to find a CSWP consultant
near you.
I remember discussions on this group of large assembly techniques,
lightweight parts, just suppressing certain parts or subassemblies,
using design tables to drive a family of similar products &
configurations in both parts and assemblies, limiting rebuilds and
more. You can use those key words to quickly search out some of those
techniques discussed in the past. I think these will get you some
help.
Bo
It's not quite as simple as that. The reasons why SW is as popular as
it is are for the very reasons that John H has said. I saw it first
hand working for a VAR. Many people hadn't heard of anything except SW
and in fact many people honestly think that SW is the only 3d mech
package around. Then you show them a fancy pre-canned carefully
crafted demo and they're blown away. Demos that include garbage like
autoballooning and autodimension etc. etc. that NEVER work in the real
world.
So here I am, an experienced mechanical designer that is looking for
work. Which software package do I need to know to be employable?
Whichever is popular, not which is best.
Fortunately I'm working with a group of design consultants now that
are working directly for manufacturers and we're in a position to
choose whichever CAD package we need. Right now we're seriously
looking at ProE because there are people around here that know it. In
my neck of the woods it's all SW, ProE and Inventor.
While I'm continuing to rant I'll share another reason I'm PO'd at SW.
At this very moment I'm trying to hide certain edges in a drawing. SW
places edges over top of edges (big no-no in ACAD). When I select an
edge it invariably hides the entire edge if you know what I mean and
the screws up the drawing. Quite literally my very next move is the
undo button which does NOTHING. Then I try to select the edge to show
the edge and this fails too. Now I'm stuck with a screwed up section
view. This very problem has persisted in SW since the day I started
with it.
Thankfully SW now allows you to add a fancy diamond plate skin to the
feature manager because I really need that.
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.