Following up on the thread "It's quiet in here!!" (including Ed Eaton's caveats) and other threads started since SP2.1 came out it makes me think that SW2004 may actually be ready for prime time now, with some minor problems remaining in Surfacing (which may never be completely up to snuff anyway). Is this the general consensus? Drawings seem to have speeded up significantly and no spontaneous suppressions yet reported, to my knowledge. Let's hear a "yea" or two (or a "nay" or two).
2 days on sp 2.1 with a really hairy assembly that I could BARELY create a drawing from in sp1. Finished up drawings with sp2.1 with no problem. I'm really glad the job went on-hold for a month.
Haven't seen the random suppression thingy either.
SP 2.1 has been great for me in the SolidWorks arena. Drawings are much faster!! Hurray.
I have had issues with PW2 and Sp2.1. Of course these issues show up at the worst possible time. I posted in the discussion /customer experience section at the SW website. I probably didn't pick the best time to post since I really need to get a project out the door and PW2 wasn't playing well Sp2.1.
The issue is with room walls in PW2 displaying images you have attached to them. I use the walls to show reflections in many of my renderings. It has limitations but generally works quite well. Once Sp2.1 was installed the walls would only show as the color black. To back up a step or two. The walls have a default SW material attached. When the walls are initially turned on the SW material displays as normal. Of course the default material is never used. I have a library of custom materials I have created specifically for the walls. Usually these materials consist of a jpg picture of some outdoor scene. The jpg is converted to the format for PW2. These scenes are attached to the walls for reflection purposes.
In previous version of PW2 this feature worked fine. After SP2.1 was installed these custom materials applied to the walls show totally black. Even if you try and re-apply a stock PW material the walls remain black. A word of caution for anyone who uses PW2 and SP2.1
Has anyone else had this happen?
I was at SW World a couple weeks ago and I spent about 10 hours with people form the PW product team going over issues, enhancements and wish list items. They were very helpful, curious and genuinely interested in how to make PW better. I felt really good about being listened to and involved in the entire process. I really feel SW is listening to their customers and putting forth a great effort to improve their products and connect with users. I just wish the entire process worked a little more smoothly. As it is now I have much improved drawings performance at the expense of PW2 capability. Is it really to much to ask that all features of the product work well (correctly) with each other all at the same time?
2 days no probs yet ! Also seems to have cured a cdt I got in sp1 when double clicking to open a (complex) assy.
Only snag was with the (*&&^%&*) windows installer ..... such a pain cf the install sheild .. 1st attempt didnt work, but at least the repair option worked OK .. but in the process swks 2003 got wiped. May be Windoz install will alow me to install 2003 after 2004 ? ... if it does then I'll give it the nod as install shield never allowed this.
If only solidworks would have a 'save as' 2003, or say last 2 releases ... I'd accept a few dumb solids for any new functions in the feature tree but completely dumb X_T with no parametrics is not an option.
So far, fairly good. We switched to SP2.1 when one of us found a consistent CTD in SP0 drawings. Yesterday I found two consistent ways to CTD in SP2.1, but they are probably model related and there were workarounds for both.
We haven't been doing much surfacing lately, since we've been working on internals to establish the framework for the ID folks. I'm scared to death of what is going to happen when they send us the files from Alias and we try to make the outer parts.
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