A Day in the Life
I’m having two problems A LOT these days. I’m working on some stylish sports products recently. They’re just plastic parts that are entirely curved. There are three versions, and two sizes, and then accessories to match. All these parts have to fit together perfectly, and look good. Oh, and work. They also have to work. (Imagine that.)
The problems are that when a trim sketch is inside a spherical shape, it seems to flip directions (front or back) quite a lot, especially after an undo. We used to have a problem where trims would flip keep/remove, but this problem is like several times a day, and devastating to the model tree every time it does it.
The second problem is less serious, but still annoying. The models I’m working with can have around 20 surface bodies at some point in the tree. I’m using the Display Pane to turn on and off bodies all the time. But what’s happening is that a body is not displayed, even though it is shown as shown in the Display Pane. To fix it, I’ve been turning the body off, then back on again, and it works ok for a while.
I’m at the point where I’m inching my way through 3 levels of master model references, each with about 150 features, repairing parts feature by feature. What a waste of time. The thing I spend the most time doing is troubleshooting – trying to figure out what’s wrong.
Other common problems:
- Selection Manager references erroring out for no apparent reason, reselect all selections to fix
- Knit features not showing errors when they only have one body selected.
- Ruled surfaces angled to vectors can flip sides of the vector within a single feature, with no control except select another method
- Ruled features losing selected edges without any warning or error
- Complex trims are very difficult with the visual cacophony of colors and faces on top of faces
- Very difficult to find geometry errors causing projected curves to partially fail (only on certain faces)
- Fill surfaces are unusable when using c2 edge conditions due to severe egg cartoned surfaces (looks like a spiky 3d seismograph)
- Some trims can’t be repaired without deleting everything from the selection boxes and reselecting
- Fillets that show up on the screen, but don’t have any items selected, and don’t display any errors – too weird for words
- Boundary connectors flipping and resetting themselves to the ends of edges if a surface is trimmed.
I’ve got easily 3x the time into this project that I should have, and probably 2x what I can bill for as a direct result of flaky software. If it just did what it was supposed to do, we’d be fine. Making the model the first time is ok. Making edits is murder. I can’t show or post the data, but these are real problems. In addition to the software problems, there are the problems I get paid to deal with – figuring out how to draft a complex shape to avoid a complex mold.
My last medical product design (I’ve mentioned previously) exhibited six out of ten items in that list. Many were taken care of after figuring out (with corporate-level SW help, via my VAR) that the model was literally losing track of face IDs. How does that happen? Seriously? That’s like having identical IP addresses on the same network. Nothing but disaster.
But other items, such as the trim problems and missing edge selections seem permanently endemic to the software. I can get a model to obtain temporary stability, but as with the case of shifting splines, what happens if we ever need to revisit tooling in the future? Perhaps I’m using a future version of the software on a new workstation? Disaster. Devastation.
And never mind the long road of edits and counter-edits to get the model to simply survive its own feature tree during a rebuild. I’d estimate a similar 300% factor in hours worked to billable hours on some projects. Somebody has to eat the CAD-fail overage, but it’s not fair to pin that on the client. Or myself. Awkward.
You should go further and say you would like to be paid for half your time as well 😉
Probably though, you need to attract their interest by reporting an important issue like…I dunno…faulty mouse gestures….something to take them away from coding search engines and integrating social media anyway…
@R.Paul Waddington
RPW, I’d definitely welcome a visit. No one has done that from SW. I’m not optimistic that it would happen or that it would change anything, but if they were willing to put a day of someone’s time into it, I’d put a day of my time into it.
Switching software may be a reaction to continuing problems but it ain’t going to help Matt when he needs it.
Can I suggest it’s time for a person from Solidworks to visit Matt (you know actually show up in person) to look at the issues. It would definately help Matt for the simple reason Solidworks is only of value if it makes Matt money through productivity. It will help Solidworks in two ways; one, improving the product and two, better press at an important time.
If Matt were a customer of mine and or I held a managment position at Solidworks I would be right onto this problem.
An alternative might be for the Solidedge guys to rush software and a development guy over to Matt’s, working together to get his job done and showing Solidworks staff, currently at play in a conference, what running a business suppling business tools is actually about: customers’ making money!
Who’s it to be a smart person/company with something to lose or anaother with nothing to lose and something to gain?
you need nx or catia matt, true.
or maybe pro-e, that’s more or less a standard for mold shops around here.
Anon, that’s true too. SolidWorks has lots of partner chunks of code.
I am only learning NX, and at an intermediate level, but have nothing but praise for it’s stabilty. As for Solidworks – I will never use it again, so long as I live because of the same sort of problems Matt describes. I believe one of the biggest single problems with SWX is in relation to the issue of tangency. It certainly doesn’t show which quadrant to use with the tangency relation like Catia does. This leads me to wonder if it even keeps track of this vital information at all.
As for NX being a merged version of UGS and I-deas – that is indeed true, but I was told at a training session for PDM that SWX is over 20 pieces of software brought under the SWX umbrella. To be honest I had such loathing for SWX in the end I registered a domain [xxx] and started to publish some of the problems I was having. In the end i had a mental breakdown and left. Please note – the URL should no longer work. I really feel for Matt and all those who face this problematic piece of crap code on a daily basis. I know I wasn’t emotionally strong enough.
And before anyone comments – I was very capable re. skills, techniques and experience. I read Matt’s bible (and then surf/admin when they became available). This was after doing Ed Eaton’s curvy stuff. And yes despite being a software pirate I paid for the books Matt.@Kevin De Smet
Something worries me about NX being stable, considering it came from the amalgamation of Unigraphics and I-DEAS… does not sound like a recipe for a stable product (powerful, yes, but not stable!)
I am a pirate not a salesman. I have tried most of the CAD software and NX is simply the best. IMHO.@Neil
Funny… these are the same bugs as in SW2007. I encounter at least one a day. When a trim fails the entire feaure tree goes nuts. It is very had to select the right items to get it back working. Sometimes I need to delete all trims and build up the shape again. I am starting to build up a part of the design and export it as .igs and bring it back as a dead part for the next kind of features. This makes sense for a product outer mold line. When the saves take a long time I save as a new name, the file will usually be smaller and work better for a while. The crap keeps building so an occasional re-launch of SW can help. The SW file will have some representation of every feature ever tried, modified or deleted in the model. So sometimes I just have to copy and paste the sketches to build it all new again.
My favorite bug is the twisted brocolli shaped sweep feature. Or the lofts with wings and petals. Or the lofted planar surfaces that are not quite planar enough to combine.
I do not worry, all of the bugs will be fixed in the cloud. The database will be uncorruptable. DS will take care of my data. I am worried.
1% of the bugs eh? So NX has about 20 bugs a release….hmmmm….
I truly believe….posts like that don’t help sell me Siemens software.
In fact they remind me of everything I hate about CAD salesmen.
The problems you are having are similar to what made me quit my job as a SWX draftsman. Since that time I have been using NX8 and it has around 1% of the bugs SWX does. And Siemens are upfront about it. They include all known issues with the software. The CAST learning stuff is poor and their is so much of a need for the “NX Bible” it’s not even funny. I truly believe NX will be the market leader in high end CAD in ten years and Dassault will be history.
With the exception of number 9, I unfortunately can relate to every point you’ve made. Unfortunately, even more so, due to the frequency in which these problems occur. These aren’t unique and exclusive events, but seemingly inherent issues with the underpinnings of the software and it’s ability to be even mildly flexible with perfectly reasonable edits. There is no clear rationale for these failures. You’re certainly not alone.
Surface bodies not turning on properly, I have run into this also. You can try a complete rebuild. Turning on and off the body in the display manager like you are doing does not always work.
What also you should try is changing the display to full wireframe, then back to shaded, that has worked in the past for me.
Also I have run into item 3, 4 often blowing up entire part.
Also item 7, surface flaking out on a rebuild or a slight adjustment, with all boundry edges curved.
Item 8, If you change anything in the history tree before a trim that affects the surface you are triming the only way to fix it is what you describe.
Also using master models I have had the references to the split out parts just fail for no apparent reason. Having to go back to the split and resave over the split parts with the same filename. Nerve racking the first time it happened because I did not know if the files would reconect without wiping everything done in the split part file.
Good luck to you, one of my recent plastic design of 4 parts in SW the files were just under 100 MB for a handheld clamshell. And a minor change in the base geometry would create hours of work fixing everything that would blowup.
However on the bright side, with SW after sitting at the grinding wheel long enough, I was able to complete the job.
I don’t do a lot of surfacing so I don’t encounter most of your list that often, but the bodies not displaying when they should (and the reverse – displaying when they shouldn’t) is driving me crazy on a family of models I’m working on now. It seems to be related to another problem where appearances assigned to one body show up on another (but not the intended one). This is on a family of parts with 2-8 bodies – I really hate that even the 2 body version can’t keep the bodies straight.
Maybe it is time to take a serious look at NX. I know that NX is expensive but there is no price for sanity.