New project, and 2012 “experience”
I’ve been working on a new writing project recently, which is part of the reason I haven’t been writing here. Another part of the reason is that I’m just kind of sick of the drama, but there isn’t much else to talk about. Maybe this project will give me something to talk about. I can share visuals of this data, but I can’t share the data itself. I guess I’ll use my experience with this project to comment more thoroughly on SolidWorks 2012.
It’s tough to comment meaningfully on a new release without having really done some work in it. I kind of chuckle when I read these news reports that extol the virtues of SolidWorks 2012, when the people writing them don’t have any personal experience with it at all. From that point of view – you know, the one where you see canned demos that work perfectly all day long – it always looks good. You get a little more perspective when you’re down and dirty, doing the mouse clicks yourself, and trying to use SolidWorks as a tool for real work.
Little that I used for this project was new. Only a few things of any note (as far as this project goes) have been added to the last 4 releases. So to me, commenting on SolidWorks 2012 is the same as commenting on SolidWorks 2008, but giving them 4 years to get the bugs worked out.
The first thing that I’ve noticed about working in SolidWorks after having spent some time using other software is that SolidWorks really has spent an extraordinary amount of time working on how geometry is displayed. The good news is that the above image is not rendered. It’s just RealView with the ambient occlusion option in 2012. The AO option has been available for some time as a hack, but 2012 is the first time it ships in the View>Display menu. It does give a level of realism that’s pretty nice, I have to admit, but the downside is that it takes a few seconds to repaint the screen on an antique computer like mine. I can’t work with the setting turned on, I just flip it on every now and then.
The RealView side of how the model looks is pretty extraordinary, but the rendering is abyssmal. They have also spent a lot of time on the rendering, going on their -what – 4th renderer now, is it? It would be one thing if the result were really fantastic, but it’s not. PhotoView is so good that many of the go-to rendering folks among SW users are now using other software.
Another good thing is the 2011 functionality added to the surface extrude feature that lets you extrude a face (it really just pushes it in, or indents it). On a 63 vette model I did and on this motorcycle, the indentation on the tank was so much easier with this bit of function that I originally pooh-poohed. I still don’t understand why it won’t do the same from a sketch – it would have tripled the usefulness for me.
Also, notice the spring on the front of the bike. It’s not a great angle to see it, but it’s a very variable helix. I do think they’ve done a nice job on that. In fact, that’s the only of the “curve” features that I’ve got anything good to say about at all. I have to note, though, that the long-standing (7 years?) bug of not being able to select a curve after it has been used in another feature is more than just annoying at this point. I think SolidWorks shows its customers great disrespect when they leave bugs like this in there for so long, and then proclaim geometry a dead issue by going hell-bent for anything-but-CAD. Deep breath, Matt.
On the down side, I crashed 3 times just today. In every case it was trying to open or insert the headlight part into/from an assembly. Is it a corrupt part? No, I don’t think so, it’s in there and working now. Also, I had at least 2 instances of flipped trim features, a dome that failed on creation, but let you create it anyway, a lot of problems with egg-cartoning Fill surfaces, really weird stuff with component patterns following feature patterns, and some problems with managing 3D sketches.
Also, they still haven’t fixed the problem with scroll wheels on dialog boxes when you have multiple monitors, even though they have added some nice new multi-monitor tools to the interface. The problem in this case is where your cursor flies off to the extreme right side of the right monitor when you spin a scroll wheel in the interface.
Figuring out how to do a chain in SW took some effort. I read some of the stuff in the forums on the topic, which seemed to center on making motion with a chain, not in actually creating the geometry. This is a great opportunity for SW to make a CAD related development. I had to use multi-bodies for the chain because the needed functions are not available in assemblies.
In general, there are several areas of the interface and a few features that are  just screaming out for attention. Still. Since SW is so concerned with “experience” these days, it’s like going to the store and finding one apple crawling with maggots out of a bin with several hundred perfectly fine apples. What is your “experience” with that? Makes you not want to go back, right? The way they throw the word “experience” around, you’d think the SolidWorks software was a Disney ride instead of a tool. To me it shows that they are focused on the wrong things, and what they have given us in releases after 2007 is further evidence. Experience with a tool has to do with predictability, reliability, and results. Same as ever. Not gloss and a lot of unrelated fluff.
You may have heard SolidWorks employees mention that their software is “80% software”. I’ve heard it a fair bit without paying much attention to it until recently. I guess they are meaning that they strive for that 80/20 rule – maybe they think they give 80% of users 80% of what they need. What you should take from that is that if what you use CAD for is right in the center of what SolidWorks does best (simple extruded parts with few features, small assemblies, and drawings that don’t have special requirements), then the software may be for you. But, if you work on the fringes at all, on the boundary of that 80% or beyond, say you do large assemblies, surfacing, complex shapes, or anything vaguely out of the mainstream, your professional life working with this software quickly devolves into being a developer of workarounds. My “experience” with the software is increasingly that it simply isn’t meant for people who do this kind of work. I spend more time wrangling CAD than I do developing actual ideas for products. And that’s the truth.
“80%” means you don’t come to work on Friday. “80%” means 2.5 hour lunch breaks. “80%” means you kinda try, but not really. “80%” means you’re not really very good at any one thing. The truth is that some areas of the software (like the model display) get the proverbial 110% effort, and other areas (like surfacing, rendering, motion, assembly mates, and sketching) get more like 50%. So that’s 80%, +/- 30%.
Not that this has changed recently. It has been this way for some time. What has changed recently is that they are more open about where all the effort is going, since it isn’t going into CAD any more. It’s going into architectural software, consumer grade software, IT infrastructure software, cloud apps that no one uses, while they leave their customers to wonder how to justify funding it all.
I’m not going to predict that SolidWorks is going out of business. I’m sure they will continue on. But they will do it with a different set of customers. They don’t seem to be developing anything that anyone bought the software to get. They seem to be walking away from their existing customers, searching for some chimeric figment of Bernard Charles imagination. Maybe that will pay off, and maybe it won’t. Who am I to say. I’m just pretty sure that the CAD users they are leaving behind are going to need to find somewhere else to go. The company that once existed is nowhere to be seen. Some good individuals remain, but the people I speak to at SW just don’t seem as enthused as they once were. The product that so many people were excited about has stagnated. While the V6 glow on the horizon holds some promise, I think the Dassault juggernaut is going to stumble bringing something to market that is in any way useful, and it may be years before they work back up to that 80% that now looks so inadequate.
Nice modeling and rendering! I rarely hear about anyone using SW anymore, but I guess it all depends on the industry you work in. Any time I am working on an industrial design project I tend to gravitate towards rhino 3d.
Returning to the original topic, this afternoon we were testing the rendering speed on the new hardware in SW2012/PhotoView by opening an old project of a complex plastic moulded product with lots of internal electronics, powersupply, wiring etc. I was showing off the new hardware to an associate who popped in and he proceeded to apply frosted plastic to the whole outer case, and half the internals as well.
Two things we noted. First the new hardware goes like a rocket 🙂 Even with frosted plastic all over it , and a 2000pixel render it did the job in under 5 mins. Second, we were fiddling with the RealView and Ambient Occlusion and we were astounded by the quality. I’d love to post what we saw but I can’t, but as someone who has knocked RealView in the past I have to say 2012 is a breakthrough release for this stuff with AO turned on. This is certainly something I will be using going forward – it has a really nice illustration type quality to it – in realtime!
You get no argument from me about the avatar life like crap. I’ve posted my views on the Showroom stuff (can’t recall the name – must be my age) and even had someone from DS call me up to discuss it.
What I understand by lifelike is the functionality rather than the visuality (is that a word?).
For example, if you create a plastic part with a snap fit, as you drag the parts in an assembly you would see the plastic deform and snap. As you push on a component it would deform lifelike until you get to break point. That is (as I understand it) what DS are investing in (and by all accounts, what they are well along the road to achieving).
The difference then, is that you will have lifelike physical responses to systems in the same way that you have good quality realtime visualisation using RealView. Perhaps this added functionality is only available via a cloud delivered app – I have no idea. But if that was the future, I personally think it would be something to shout about.
In this day and age where you have CGI that offers a lifelike static experience for relatively low cost offering a realtime lifelike functionality experience is something new. I just think DS don’t explain what they are doing very well, and using 1990 avatars is just, well, rubbish.
@Devon Sowell
Wow, what was used for that? Maya? 3DSMax? Cinema 4d?
DS SolidWorks; THIS is quality 3D Life Like Experience, 1,000X better than yours.
http://youtu.be/P4boyXQuUIw
I am importing many old dwg files into sketches in Solidworks. A 225K dwg file grows to 6.8M when it is imported as a sketch. No relations were generated, no value added. Fonts are well messed up. Text becomes bloated spline outlines. Interaction gets slow. There must be a better way.
@matt
I once created a SolidWorks Animation for a client that makes tools to bend pipes and tubing. I modeled everything in SolidWorks and animated the process of cutting the tube and bending it too. I put about 60 hours into it. It came out very nice.
But the reality was that the customer could have saved time and money by simply going out to their shop and video taping the machine in action. Duh.
The CPR animation by DS is lame. Again, just video tape someone practicing CPR on a dummy. Faster, cheaper and looks better.
@chad
That kind of thing has its place. Using 3D software for training is good for pilots, navigating a nuke facility with a robot, and some other stuff, but where it requires something tactile, like CPR, not so much. They have “lifelike” dolls for that. I don’t want to say 3D manikins are useless, it’s just in a completely different direction from what’s useful to me, and I see the stuff that is useful for product design getting less and less attention. Sustainability, costing, “defeature”, “web noodles”, maybe someone needs all that, but I know I don’t. I still need new stuff in CAD, and I still need the existing stuff fixed. I’m not against development, I just need relevant development. 80% software may as well be 0%.
I’ve been trying to do some chains lately and heaven forbid…flipping mates drive me crazy at the best of times.. but doing chains just makes you want to go out and shoot something! (namely software developers!). The mating setup is somethign thats totally logical and within the rules yet SolidWorks just gets funky with it! Its so frustrating not having the one thing that would fix it…. normals control!
@chad
Chad-
What a poorly conceived and executed video. It’s lame to the max. I’m astounded that anyone would release a video like that.
This is the DS “3D life like experience”? LOL! The woman in the video wears a short skirt and high heels, cheesy and sexist.
It’s scary that DS upper management thinks this type of crap is any good.
Devon
How does the Feature Tree Freeze work? Is it stable? I installed SW2012 but haven’t really tried it yet on compex models because I have to finish my recent projects in SW2011.
Matt, I think your missing the big picture. In the near future you will be able to save lives with the click of a mouse. Who needs mechanical software when you can morph into a cardiologist and save all those SW users from the death of Solidworks.
http://www.3ds.com/products/3dvia/3dvia-studio/staying-alive/
Matt-
Nice modeling on that twisted front fork brace.
Devon
Interesting comments Matt. I took delivery last week of a new workstation – 2 screens, 16GB RAM, overclocked i7 (4.5GHz), SSD startup and application drive, 2GB ATI Fire card. All I can say is it dramatically improves the experience! I have a clean install of 2012 on it, and the RealView has finally become useful!
On PhotoView though, I really don’t agree. Many of the go to SolidWorks rendering folk have always gone to other apps to do renders anyway. I myself use Modo, Keyshot and Maxwell in conjunction with Photoview. Part of the reason we moved to other rendering systems in the first place was that PhotoWorks was so rubbish (and yes you could get decent renders out if you were prepared to spend ages – I wasn’t). Photoview gives you less options – but – it is faster, more consistent and better quality.
Why do we continue to use other systems if PhotoView is so good? Well it is a question of resources. Photoview is tied to SolidWorks. I prefer to render outside the CAD system, maybe on a different machine. But Photoview has one key benefit – it is linked to SW, when the model updates the render updates and sometimes that is essential.
Compared to other built in renderers I’ve seen in other apps, PhotoView is streets ahead.
I’ve been noticing the 80% too, and my work is right up the middle of the target audience described. I would have guessed slightly higher than 80%, but anything outside of that is simply broken, flaky, or in some other way useless when “functioning as designed”. ~20% of SolidWorks is not what it could or should be. I hope the V6 team is writing software that can be relied on.
@Charles
Thanks for that. The setting helps a bit on my system, but not to the point where I’d be tempted to use it. I’m not sure what the advantage is to work with the setting on. I like it for display (screen shots) but not so much for working in the assembly.
@Steve
Actually, yeah, I want to redo this in SE. I just need some time. I used some surfacing features, but I don’t think it’s anything that SE can’t do. I’ll make sure to post it here when I do it.
@solidworm
Yeah, “lifelike”. Huh. So far the “lifelike” bit can only be applied to visuals. I guess Dassault will leave the actual design up to other software.
@Neil
Neil, it’s for a project that you probably won’t see. Different audience.
Tools>Options>System Options>Display/Selection. The last check box is “Display draft quality ambient occlusion”. That checkbox makes all the difference on my up-to-date system. I’m not sure if it works well on older systems. It turns on a draft quality ambient occlusion even when you rotate the model, which significantly cuts down on that flashing on/off AO while rotating.
You don’t happen to feel like redoing the model in SolidEdge do you Matt 😉 ? As you’ve said, no one can properly comment on a tool until they’ve really seen it in use (whether that’s using it themselves or getting reliable feedback from their employees doesn’t bother me) and I’d be interested to see if you’d have less problems or just different problems.
In fact I’ve got a bit of time on me so I’m thinking of downloading the trial version to see how remodelling our product in SE works out.
We’re still hanging out on 2009 here, which my boss picked up for not much more than a beer from our neighbour company who shut up shop, and having read your comments over the last year on the [lack of] improvements to the geometry building side of the software I can’t say I’m particularly impressed with SW. I’ve been using the software in a less professional fashion over the last 10 years but the last year I started a new job in a small company where I’m THE mechanical engineer in the company taking care of all the mechanicaly related things of this company’s little baby project. I’ve never had to model something in such detail as I’ve had to before this year (big thanks to you for your surfacing book by the way) and now as production is just around the corner the realities of PDM are setting in. As I look into what we’re going to do with a PDM system I think it would be simpler for us to go with a combined package solution (DS,Siemens,PTC) but to hell with DS, there’s not a chance that they’re going to be considered. It’s hard for me to buy into their current outlook when I’ve got a plane sitting in the middle of my massive history tree that just wants to do nothing more than flip (well I don’t know if it’s flipping but it just suddenly started crashing SW during rebuild (problem was eventually solved, after a hefty remodeling effort on my part)).
If I’ve got problems like the afformentioned one, and one can safely come to the conclusion that there appears to be no interest in solving them if we believe your musings, why am I going to tell my boss to invest in this software that’s most likely going to be clouded (not necesarily a poblem) but then quite possibly have DS tell me that I need to pay annually for access to my stuff (definitely a realistic issue)?
Their strategy is now “lifelike experience”, that should mean they are now more interested in developing simulation tools as opposed to geometry tools. but they don’t have focus on that issue either. its going in wrong direction. “digitizing human cells”, now thats what we need!
Nice bike Matt. The seat even looks comfortable for oldies like myself with middle age spread. Might need a cover for the exhaust to avoid a burnt leg though. Is that for a SW2012 book or some totally new project?
I thought reuse of curves was listed in the 2012 What’s New – perhaps it is broken ATM?
Re chains, yeah very obviously something that needs to be done. MCAD ought to do chains well and easily. Should have been done right from the beginning. If only someone had actually considered if what they had coded really delivered what people wanted/needed to do in practice. Same with patterns on a curve. Although the shortcomings have been around for a lot longer I finally put in an ER about 2-3 years ago despite knowing SW weren’t likely to fix it even though these issues come up on the forums fairly often.
Very frustrating to know there is no shortage of things that could be done.
A lot of it actually isn’t that hard to do and would turn SW into a really sweet program to use.
What a pity the written off SW code couldn’t be bought up by enthusiasts and put back on the road with a performance tune.
I think there are a lot of folk who would want to work on it and a lot who would still buy and upgrade if it was refloated under new ownership/management with the right engineering focus.