Catia at SolidWorks World
The presentations from SolidWorks World are available. You can see with a search that there were 2 presentations on Catia. Why is Catia being shown at SolidWorks World? You guys still think I’m making this up? One presentation was about 3D patterns mapped onto surfaces. Stuff that’s pretty far out of the range of what you can do with SolidWorks. The presentation didn’t really get into much detail, judging from the pictures, but the level of detail they were able to achieve was remarkable. All of the faceting in headlight lenses, surface finishes on various parts. Lots of talk about which modules you had to have to get certain necessary commands.
The second presentation based on Catia at SolidWorks world seems to be specifically about composite design. The presentations feature Catia-type customers predominantly. Planes, trains, automobiles. Dassault will one day figure out that SolidWorks customers work on very different kinds of products than Catia customers (Catia pronounced ka-cha by the French).
And of course, the “If We Play” logo is intriguing beyond words.
I would have preferred seeing a presentation from a third-party like Simulayt Composites Modeler for SolidWorks or Anaglyph Laminate Tools for SolidWorks. At least these are running inside of SolidWorks, sort of, and are doing the whole composites thing, kind of.
But the idea of shoving CATIA on people just doesn’t sit so well I’d imagine.
The CATIA composites module for SolidWorks would not make so much financial sense. While I admit that it is pretty dang powerful, for complex geometry you need yet another add-on to get it to work properly to flatten the plies. Even for CATIA it is very expensive. At the time, the modules necessary to get composites to work cost more than the CATIA basic seat alone by a substantial amount. Knowing the cost of CATIA, you can then imagine the cost of the seat of the composites licenses. They have changed their licensing scheme, so the cost may have dropped slightly, but being CATIA, I do not imagine that it dropped too much if at all. Though, seeing as how they actually put some training material out on the web, I will have to go take a look. I am still new to this CATIA stuff (we have a customer that requires it), and CATIA documentation is awful.
Thanks for the link Matt. If anything, after listening to the presentation on composites, I developed an appreciation that this is not something done well in SolidWorks, if at all. But I did find it to be a demonstration that DSS has developed very good technology. And that is probably their reason at being at SW World. I just find it odd that they do not offer an upgrade path to Catia. I think that there are many users of SW that could justify the cost of the upgrade because of the type of work they are doing. But, if I can’t even get a trade in on SW, well I find that insulting.
If SW and CATIA ultimately share the same kernal, there is no reason that a SW user could not have access to the composite module. IMHO, DS needs to have a product offering based on one kernal, and not on multiple marketing channels.
The suspence continues……………………..
“If We Play” logo… Seems like a company which personally understands what going over budget means?
Yeah, I think I’ll now be using that on my contracts as a option??
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