SolidWorks Sucks...

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.

LOL Flames from a burnout?

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.

Now that is a credible statement. At least the slow part.

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!!!
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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!

J00 Sux0rS

OMG Somebody from a Kia dealership has strayed in here!
John H

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.
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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.