How did you pick your CAD software? (polls)
I must admit, there is a lot less support for the CAD olympic thing than I had hoped. The goal as I saw it was really to help people who were buying CAD software make better informed decisions. And I can’t deny that there’s a little bit of academic curiosity in there, but I wasn’t envisioning this as a comparison just for the sake of a comparison – bragging rights or shame. I don’t know what Roopinder’s main goal was, but I always assumed it was to help people make better informed purchases.
We have all these CAD programs available out there, and people who don’t use them don’t know what they are capable of. For example, I’ve always heard VX was built for plastic parts and industrial design. How good is it? Can it also do drawings? SolidThinking is marketed at industrial designers, but can you also do plastic part engineering (shell, ribs, draft, etc.) with it? Is NX really “all that”?
I guess what I’m wondering is if you had all the information available to you, would you have made the same choice? Do you really need one package that is kind of so-so at a lot of things, or do you need more focused power and capabilities?
Do you feel locked in to your current CAD package because of a lack of interoperability?
We haven’t done any polls for a while, let’s see
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I am trying to get information about Solid Thinking CAD. The reviews are by non users and have little content. The current price is not listed within the reach of Google. They appear to be slightly more responsive than SolidWorks, Catia, and Solid edge. They got back to me today.
SolidThinking prices:
Node locked version $3495
USB key version $3995
update subscription $695
They have some discount or combo deal, so prices are a bit less.
All round versatility was important to me for sure. I was concerned about things that couldn’t be done even if I didn’t have a current need for them. Who is to say where you might end up in 3 or 5 years time despite your best intentions or economic winds. I came from a civil structural background and had a plan B to do small steelwork jobs for builders if necessary to keep things going. Buying CAD was a significant personal investment as would be my time learning it. I didn’t want to be tightly bound to one specialist activity. To this end I was also mindful of the availabilty of modules and add-ons that I could obtain.
So yeah I did endeavour to choose a quality swiss army knife even if I hardly used the tweezers.
I was a liitle disapponted when SW started bundling things together I didn’t really want.
However that was only one of several things SW drifted away from that became increasingly annoying. Really I was quite happy with the existing UI and the tools that arrived in each release although the bugs often made me declare loudly SW was a POS.
Unfortunately SW drifted away from being the ‘cool’ focused program I bought into originally.
This is the most disappointing aspect of SW ownership that I had not anticipated ie. being stuffed by the vendor themselves.
Can I ask this question: is it better, or more important, to know what a CAD product can do or, to know exactly what you as a user wants to be able to do – with it?
For some, in design & draughting, what they are going to be asked to do tomorrow or next week etc. is completely un-known: therefore CAD tool selection maybe/is, at best, a guess! The alternative is to choose products which place few limitations on a designers/drafties ability to document a new concept or design – maybe we should reconsider the value of a pencil and paper, extended by using 2D CAD products until 3D CAD products have reached a greater level of maturity all being able to achieve the same tasks; therefore making it possible for us to make our 3D CAD product selection in the same way we do cars or breakfast cereal 😉
I worked for the same small manufacturing company for 13 years. The first parametric modeler we got back in 1998 was by no selection process: the sales guy just knew the company’s owner. We got Mechanical Desktop v1 from Autodesk (to be upgraded to v2 a few months later). What a POS. It was cumbersome (creating 2d views was a pain), not adapted to our work (no sheet metal features) and in a matter of months (if not weeks) we stopped using it and went back to plain old 2D AutoCAD.
Four years ago my boss asked me to look for a new modeling package. At the time I had enlisted in a 32-hour SolidWorks evening course at a local college because I was thinking of finding a new job and wanted to level my skills. I took this opportunity to test the software, and tested Solid Edge at work with the help of a local VAR (they extended my demo licence 2 times so I could try it for 3 months). Every exercise I had to do in SW I remodeled in SE.
I finally chose Solid Edge for many reasons that I don’t all remember (I made a pretty extensive spreadsheet), but the most important two were those: sheet metal and structural members.
Sheet metal: in Solid Edge, you could save a sheet metal model directly to a DXF flat pattern, while in SW, you had to create a 1:1 drawing first, and then export it. Since we were working with lasercut sheetmetal intensively, and our CNC software could only import DXF/DWG, this was a big letdown from SW (although it was corrected later on I’ve heard).
Structural members: in SW, you start with a part file to create structural members. In SE, you start with an assembly file. The difference was important as we were working with unified BOMs. In SW, I would have needed to add a “child” BOM and it would’ve created problems with the way the shop worked. In SE, my assembly file could contain my structural members along with other parts, and have a single unified BOM.
Structural members: in SW, you needed to apply corner treatments after creating the structural members, through many added features. In SE, corner treatments were automatically applied according to set parameters at the structure creation. It was simply faster, although it was also sometimes buggy.
I did test another CAD package (Inventor), but not as extensively.
At my current job I still use Solid Edge and like its workflow, although I would have been fine working with SolidWorks.
We were using Solidworks 2007 and PDM works when I started working for the company I’m currently employed and we upgraded to Solidworks 2008 when it came out. Then at some point a decision was made by some one in upper management to switch to Pro/E Wildfire because “it’s what our customers and partners use” which I knew at the time to NOT be true. Our customers and partners used everything from Unigraphics to Catia and Pro/E and being an employee that used the software everyday I never had any issues with our customers/partners sending us an .iges, .step, or parasolid file. So we made this huge investment in Pro/E and Windchill and we cancelled our maintenance agreement with the Solidworks reseller. At the time we had around 18 or 19 engineers and drafters working for us and the Pro/E software and Windchill vault has not been used to date and we are still using Solidworks 2008 everyday with no plans to upgrade. What a wasted investment based on misguided information.
Matt, could you allow more than one answer for each poll (including the first) since many of us have had different experiences at different companies? It’s not that “current” is all that important anyway. It’s more that, “at any point in time when you used 3D CAD”, right?
I don’t recall ever falling in with the majority in every question on a survey (except the last one, which I didn’t find anything to check). Odd.
My first experience working with SolidWorks came back in 1997, where I went through the tutorials on an available machine after hours in the cube farm. MUCH more efficient working in 3D than 2D for what I do, so this was a big step up from ACAD 14 (or whatever I was using then). I went “independent” after that, working with a client who supplied quite a nice machine for running SW 97+, as well as allowed me all sorts of freedom for developing new invention ideas. That was a great time of learning. Later, after gaining several more clients, I purchased my own seat (v2001) and soon after, created Industrial Designhaus, LLC. By the time I had to put my own money on the line to make the purchase, I was a bit of an expert with SolidWorks, and really didn’t see much in worth-while competition, as value goes. Granted, a lot has changed since then, but at last look, I can find no other comparable tool for the cost.
I switched from Pro/E to SW in 2009 for 3 main reasons. First was that support for Pro/E was terrible. If I had a problem or wanted to expand my knowledge of the software there was virtually nothing available. Unlike SW where there are a plethora of websites and even YouTube has hundreds of tutorials and how to clips (of vastly different quality) and a number of excellent independent books. Reason 2, or really 1B, is that every other engineer or designer I knew used SW and now that I use it I can turn to them for help if I need it. Lastly, it seemed that every design firm I was interacting with used SW and it was better for relations there to show that I was of the body. I used to mention that I used Pro/E in meetings and the faces of people in the room looked like I had just farted. FWIW After seeing a demo of NX, I think if I had to switch I’d be giving that a very long look.
The company I work for, a single product r&d company, got lucky when someone downstairs from us sold their 2009 SW license to my boss for chump change. Then I started at the company and considering I’d been using SW since uni kicked us off pen and paper and sat us in front a pc back in 2000, this suited me quite well.
But I think it’s important to note something. My boss (who isn’t a suit, more of a self appointed “someone here needs to put up their hand and be the boss” person) tested a bunch of different midrange CAD systems (from the common big names to a few I hadn’t heard of) on his own, without any training or help, and came to the conclusion that SW was the only one that…. oh god I’m going to hate myself for saying this… “just worked”. No I don’t own a mac. I think that’s quite a compliment to SW, for all the crap we throw at them, particularly the last few years, they still seem to be quite newbie friendly and a lot of the people that talk and have their voices heard have forgotten this because we haven’t been a new user for quite some time.
I tried quite hard to find out what was available in the 3d CAD world through info available on the internet over a period of about 18 months. I printed out a lot of articles and acquired a stack of brochures. I considered high end, mid range and basic to gauge the limitations of each.
I actually found there was little real down low info to base decisons on and so listened in to user forums to see what people were saying and judge how helpful they would be seeing as how I was fairly isolated from other users.
I soon realised VARs were like used car salesmen and avoided dealing with them other that to request CD’s and prices. Some of them killed their prospects by their behaviour.
Then I trialled the most likely candidates over a few weeks as best as I could however when you are faced with something new its hard to form a good judgement about how it functions in regular use.
There were some UI that just werent a good fit for me personally somehow and these got bumped down the list even though the functions were ok or similar. I found I needed to relate to a program to get on with it. I think this took precedence to considering if one was a bit slower to make drawings or not.
Finally I took an evening class at the local technical school for SW to get some ‘play and confirm’ time under the eye of someone who knew their way around better than I did even if their work was different from my intended application.
It was interesting to see how other people got on learning it as well and this figured in my consideration. Honestly I cant really say it was important to me to follow what others were choosing or recommended.
I did genuinely try to pick the best tool for the job at the time regardless of how new or established the technology was.
I think I managed to make the right choice in the end. For the most part the strengths and weaknesses of a particular CAD remained anecdotal though.
Even today I am unsure if these attributes are significant or not.
I have been to busy with my commitment to SW to have pursued the finer details of each.
So yes had someone put each through some sort of independent and formal grading it would have been helpful. It would have saved a lot of effort on my part that perhaps I was not experienced enough for. I was only making a decision for myself and not a whole company. There might have been bigger consequences to a poor fit.
I went with the functionality that best allowed me to make the models I wanted/needed to.
I have to say though when I actually purchased SW and had used it seriously it was a shock to see just how bug ridden it was and how slow drawing were under load. I even considered sending it back. Then there were the sp issues. Reality was a tough master in the early days. I learned as much after purchase as before despite my best efforts tomake an informed purchase. This is stuff you learn to live with. Nothing is perfect.