CAD comparisons (poll)
Lately I’ve been interested in broadening my horizons. Comparing CAD systems seems to be my way of doing that. I’ve been talking to some industry people, and learning a lot of stuff. Most of what I’m learning is making me even less optimistic about the future of the CAD industry. Breaking out of the “one trick pony” rut can only be a good thing.
I grew up in the isolated north eastern corner of the Adirondack Park, in northern New York (the state, not the city). The park is as big as the state of Vermont. The 1980 winter olympics were held in Lake Placid, about 50 miles to the south west. The closest civilization (place with a Best Buy) would probably be Montreal, about an hour away, if you can get through customs quickly. The local accent is somewhere between french canadian and that Minnesota accent you hear in the movie Fargo.
What does upstate NY have to do with CAD comparisons? Absolutely nothing. Just to say that living in an isolated backwater is nothing new to me, and I probably gravitate toward that more than towards, say, New York (the city, not the state). Am I a provincial hick, geographically and technologically speaking? Well, that’s probably one way of looking at it. Another would be that I specialize in out of the way dusty corners. Although SolidWorks hasn’t been considered a technological backwater for some time, I fear the day is not far away when even Dassault will start calling it that.
So. With an eye toward moving on, I want to look at comparing CAD systems. Something like the Solid Edge and SolidWorks surfacing comparison. I think information should be readily available if people want to know which CAD systems have sheet metal functionality. How does Inventor compare to Alibre, from a feature point of view? If you are a consumer product developer, which tools or which combination of tools are the most prevalent for your requirements?
I don’t presume to know all the questions. I don’t presume to know how everybody will use the software. I don’t presume to have any idea at all about how you will integrate CAD software into your business process. All I know is that decisions about buying software seem to be made without much real information, in terms of the capabilities of specific software packages.
One of the things I’ve learned recently is that there are a lot of folks in the industry who don’t think geometry creation capabilities are important any more in the selection of a CAD tool. They seem to think it is far more important if say Rhino can interface with say SAP than if Rhino can create update-able models. It’s more important if your sales people can access your CAD data than if your CAD data has any engineering value at all. I think these people have some sort of vested interest in the success of the peripheral tools. Peripheral tools are important, and if companies value them, then they need to be developed. It may not be far from the mark to say that there is no longer any such thing as a “CAD industry”. The industry formerly known as the CAD industry is now PLM. And CAD is a forgotten backwater of PLM.
But I’m here to tell you (hellOOOOO!!!) that as anachronistic and glamourless as it may be, there are still some customers out here looking to spend money on CAD. We want to have a relationship with a company that wants to have a relationship with us. If SolidWorks is going to make a new product altogether, then we are all changing CAD sooner or later, whether to the new web-based dream, or something a bit more down to earth that works today. I think there is a CAD evaluation in your not too distant future.
Potential CAD customers need a place to turn for just information, whether in the form of opinions from a stated point of view, or just aggregated marketing claims. Why has the CAD press allowed the CAD industry to get away with having no serious evaluations at all? I’d be willing to bet it has more than a little to do with money and strong arm politics from the CAD companies.
To me it’s a little shocking that there isn’t something like Consumer Reports for CAD. Sure, CAD is complex, and it can be used in a lot of different ways, but there is still general information that would be of use to people investigating CAD software for various reasons.
[poll id=”10″]
I recently purchased modo, figuring it will more than pay for itself (after a couple of years of putting it off). That’s the sort of circumstance that makes paying for software/information/goods/services worth purchases, even if the price is high.
Some of the flaw in what I’ve seen in “mainstream” CAD coverage is that the content of the coverage seems spoon-fed by the marketing department of whatever software is being reviewed. Rejecting that, and replacing it with an objective (such as a “model this” benchmark) or other non-skewed report on strengths and weaknesses (like Craig mentioned above) by a real user would be very helpful. No blinders, no “suggested” areas of coverage—just real-world application representing the sorts of things often faced by those using such a product. I might even pay for that.
I think the most valuable tool, would not be a search for the ultimate winner, but rather something that reveals where a particular system’s strength’s and weaknesses are and maybe why.
The reason I propose that is because everyone has different needs. Matt speaks often of surfacing problems and geometry creation. That rarely affects me, as a machine designer, my parts are rarely complex in terms of surfacing and swoopy shapes. I need large assembly capability, ease of drawing creation, and stability. I’m not creating new shapes, I’m doing what has been done in AutoCAD (generally speaking) for years. The difference is I need to do it in extremely short time lines, I need less errors and I need it to simply work. Every time. I don’t want to recreate standard components (e.g. fasteners, bearings, etc.) That stuff has been designed and can be available.
I didn’t mean for this to turn into a wishlist 🙂 so I’ll stop! I say it’s a good idea. We are dealing with an extremely complex tool that serves many different industries and therefore many different needs.
Good ideas, Matt
Craig Sink
SolidImprov.com
One of the people who originated SW said in an interview that they’d settled on parasolid rather than ACIS because there were certain blend examples that parasolid would do that ACIS couldn’t. That was a lot of years back, but it implies that base geometry creation was pretty settled, even back then, and that parasolid and ACIS weren’t too far apart for that purpose. IronCAD uses both kernels in parallel, so the differences can’t be too considerable. A glance at user forums shows that some users complain that they can’t achieve this or that result, whereas you, as an experienced and capable user, know that the way they tried to create it was doomed to failure. What that demonstrates is that the way that CAD companies will get the greater number of new users isn’t by adding arcane capabilies to please high-end users, but by exposing the capabilities that they already have to easier use by inexperienced and uneducated (in the application-specific sense) users. A number of users who trip over a glitch frequently will tell you ‘they can’t even get the basics right’, but those users are still using the program. Ultimate capability is mostly less important than ease-of-use. What I’m saying is that back-to-back comparisons are almost meaningless. It comes down to whether you’re a Ford person or a GM person, despite protestations of other standards.
I would love to see a type of geometry designed in each of three CAD systems. What works easily, what is a pain, bugs encountered, work arounds for bugs. Does the CAD allow you to get the geometry that you want or do you just like the look of what it does.
Pick 3 “bottles” and have users show how they modeled each one with their favorite CAD. Then try and duplicate it to see if it really worked. This would be interesting to see the concepts used for shape generation.
I keep discovering more good stuff in Solidworks. It is a giant program.
The unstable geometry is really getting on my nerves. The rudder on my seaplane design keeps flipping around backward, and then will not fit in the well.
Matt,
I think you have some good ideas. Don’t give up. It sounds like you’ve been thinking hard about this for some time. I think it is a matter of working out the potential problems and finding participants.
One of the things that has to be thought out is how the judging / scoring would be done, even if it is not a “shootout” style. I guess you would have some basic and advanced tasks for each user/CAD system to do, then see they are achieved with each CAD system. Would scoring be based on some combination of time to completion, mouse clicks, a general feel of ease-of-use / intuitiveness?
I also wonder if the results would prompt CAD companies to try and improve in their low-scoring areas. That would be the best possible outcome, but maybe it’s not realistic.
I would be very happy with an unbiased review of CAD programs. The problem with all this is that politics always gets in the way and your left with poor dishonest results. Autodesk is the worst about this because they they love throwing their weight around. Inventor is very much like Alibre, just with a better UI. Until a shift in management takes place in the states, you will continue to see ice cubes being sold to Eskimos.
@ralphg
Ralph,
I’m not sure one person would have to do the whole thing. I’m not sure it would have to be a “shootout” style thing. Maybe you don’t have to make it so huge that it’s impossible. I think there is still a way to get useful information out to people who want it, while not just reading back a marketing brochure, and not just skipping it altogether. Maybe it just turns out to be a user led thing, like the modeling challenges I host from time to time, where people model a benchmark part, post the finished part, and write about how it went for them.
@Tom Helsley
You can fund just about anything through advertising these days, if the site gets enough hits. You could get people around the CAD industry who weren’t directly affected by the results to pony up. Folks like 3D Connexion, CAM vendors, maybe HP, cell phone companies, service providers, and so on.
@matt
Yeah, I don’t trust any of the magazine publishers. They always paint rosy pictures of the software they review. Unfortunately, they are probably the best suited for coordinating a “CAD Olympics”, but the moderator and users in the competition should be carefully picked from elsewhere. Someone such as yourself might make a good moderator. But who would play the part of the users for each CAD software? Application Engineers from VARs? Who would be willing to put the time and effort into it?
@Tom Helsley
I really don’t know. I’m definitely interested in some sort of comparative information between modelers, and there is a whole list of people I don’t trust to provide objective information. It would have to be moderated, and it would almost certainly be flawed in some way. It would have to use experts, but experts are probably biased. Maybe the expert is the tour guide and a moderator or panel of moderators scores functionality.
We will see what happens. I think something is going to happen, one way or another.
Doing Consumer Reports style evaluations of CAD software is really tough. In the early 1990s, I made a good living writing comparison reviews of DWG viewing software for magazines. This class of software handles a few tasks like redlinning and printing, but doesn’t do much more than that. It is really simple software, yet the reviews were exhaustive — like 2,500 words long.
One man can handle reviewing a half-dozen pieces of DWG viewing software; no one can exhaustively review a half-dozen CAD programs. (Well, maybe they could, if they were all IntelliCAD variants).
As others have noted, anyone who knows one CAD package well can’t review other packages well. This shortcoming has been brought up many times, and we all know the answer now: what you want can’t be done. Nobody even wants to do CAD shootouts anymore.
In any case, I find that CR’s evaluations of technical equipment, like computers, to be really weak. A computer is not a BBQ. So I don’t think you actually would want CR reviewing CAD software, either.
PS: You get to guess which CAD vendor paid me to write this, you paranoid brat!
So, who would conduct these comparisons?
Not to knock the idea down, but as I recall reading a while back , there was a blog post about bias and lack of expertise in evaluating CAD software (http://www.dezignstuff.com/blog/?p=902). This made a lot of frustrating sense. Usually, the folks best suited for evaluating a CAD software are the folks who use it regularly, and the only people willing to spend the time on evaluations were those who made the software or those who wanted to buy the software. It is kind of a catch-22.
So, Matt, are you proposing something different now?
I would really like a source of information on software both cad and cam based on just what the parent program can do and the heck with all the window dressing stuff. Geometry is the only reason for any of the peripherals to exist and yes the industry is walking away from this concept in most cases. In the rush to look cutting edge to prospective stock analysts or new customers or whoever the basics of geometry creation is secondary.
My most recent software search has been for cam, but there are similarities in how these are handled. It is like dealing with bad news used car salesmen and you just don’t have time to give a decent number of programs real and honest evaluations. The kind that involve you sitting down for the majority of the 30 day trial periods time and using it after learning it. I don’t know anyone who has the time to sit down and master a new program and check it against what they are doing currently with software within that time frame. Add in a few more and now you have easily four to five months where all you do is come up with nothing more than a pretty educated guess.
Would I like to have at least a reference point I could kind of trust to start from? You bet I would.
For my money Christmas is about what the name says and I don’t give a flip about PC correct. May you all have a good one and remember the real reason for it.
Sounds good but perhaps you should be asking more detailed questions as well like, would people actually pay for it? and whether they would subscribe to say a bimonthly report focusing on one vendor each time or purchase a comparison of the whole field being revised annually or….
You want to make it worth your while and know if the market for it is ongoing.
I think people reading technical comparisons as part of an evaluation process would want to know about other things besides the geometry tools, like rendering and simulation, and probably the stuff we aren’t so enthusiastic about even if you decide it has limited value. I don’t think you could just write up about circles and lines and expect a big audience.
Probably the real worth though is in tackling a real project and seeing exactly how the vendors solution delivers, ie you tried to do x,y,z with it and it managed to score 1,2,3 for reasons a,b,c etc.
What would concern me about a mission like this is that you would likely get captured by the same undue influences that other writers have caved to already. Immediately a vendor supplies you with software or travel and accomodation you will obligated to say nice things about it or gloss over the gotchas. If you don’t you will be frozen out…or what you write will be somehow discredited or attacked. All said and done big business isn’t mature or honest enough to accept decent journalism let alone criticism.
Just look at the way Dassault minions crawl over this blog when something is said that isn’t constant admiration and praise.
Btw Merry Christmas or whatever suits and thanksfor your user friendly blog this year.