I attended the National Design Engineering Show in Chicago this week. I won't bore you with the nifty engineering stuff I found. But I did get a chance to spend some time in the CAD booths though I held off till near the end of the day when things weren't so busy. Strangely enough I spent most of my time in the SolidEdge Booth learning a few more things about it. I threw out a mini modeling challenge to both the SE guru and a SW guru. And I helped out a bit with a disgruntled Inventor user who was looking at SE. Since we both had similar questions for the guru this worked out quite well. I just had to bite my tongue once in a while to keep from mentioning SW.
The discussion led into simplified parts and configurations. This is one thing I had seen in SE and I was curious how simplified parts were different from configurations with, say, all the fillets removed. SE uses simplified parts for some of the same reasons SW exhorts us to make a configuration with fillets and other extraneous geometry suppressed. Assembly performance and drawings benefit from simplification. SE has some tools that automagically find certain elements in a part and they are put into a suppressed state. This takes some burden off of the user. Simplified is built into parts and is not to be confused with a configuration. It has it's own place in every part which makes for consistency. When loading assemblies the user is asked whether simplified should be used. If a user tries to do this in SW it requires a lot of manual choosing of configurations during construction of an assembly.
SE also handles configurations differently than SW. Whereas SW configuration geometry resides in a single SW file, in SE each configuration becomes a separate file somewhat like a derived part. The master file remains in which parametric information resides, but the various configurations are separate and apparently stand alone. I suspect this greatly helps assembly performance. The technique could be done manually in SW but I suspect this would place a certain book keeping burden on the user.
The SE guru used a lot of keyboard shortcuts to manipulate SE. I guess that is a good thing but I haven't yet figured them all out. And you need them to do them to do some things he was doing.
I asked the SW and SE gurus to model a solid. At first they didn't quite grasp what I meant, but they eventually did understand. In SE the only way I could get the guru to make a tetrahedron was by creating two plane sketches at an angle to each other and then he boxed it in with surfaces and stitched it into a solid. The SW guru knew what a tetrahedron was and amazed me by extruding a sketch with draft in about
15 seconds. Bingo, a tet. I then asked both of them to change the length of one of the edges. Neither of these solutions would easily allow that. The SW guru then built the tet in the 3D Sketcher, but it wouldn't surface. I couldn't get the SE guru to do a 3D sketch, either it doesn't exist or he didn't know it was in the software. I tried doing a 3D sketch at home with v15 and had no problems making individual 3D curves joined at the ends. What I couldn't get it to do was put dimensions on the curves or create any kind of relations between them. SE would put patches on these curves where SW would not put planar patches on curves from a single 3D sketch. So where SW would allow creating a wireframe solid with the necessary relations through dimensions and equations, SE would not. On the other hand SE would surface and stitch them into a solid were SolidWorks would not. They are both pretty evenly matched, but both not quite where I would like them to be with regards to 3D modeling tools. .The Inventor user asked why I would want to build such geometry. I mentioned geodesic domes and space frames for a start and the lights went on. You can't be around Chicago public buildings too long without recognizing the use of such geometry.