IronCAD 2022: How Does It Stack Up?

IronCAD is a product that’s little off the beaten path. It had its beginning in a popular but short-lived industrial design product called Trispectives in 1995. Walking through the software you find a lot of interface elements that have found their way into other more popular tools on the market today. It’s tough to talk about IronCAD without a little history.

1995 – 3D/Eye releases Trispectives, Ithaca, NY (Cornell)

1998 – Visionary Design Systems (VDS) develops IronCAD from Trispectives components (Silicon Valley)

2001 – IronCAD llc splits from VDS, Atlanta, GA, partnership with CAXA, Beijing, China

While you can make just about any kind of manufactured part geometry in IronCAD, the overall package seems to be primarily intended for fabricators – sheet metal and structural weldments. It’s easy enough to make machined parts, castings, and even plastic parts, but the bulk of the more specialized functionality looks like fabricated assemblies to me. IronCAD works very well when reusing data, so structural shapes, any product created by snapping together existing designs should be very easy to do. IronCAD can also do custom parts and shapes, including surface features, lofted and patch shapes. It’s hard to imagine something it’s really not good at.

A few things set IronCAD apart:

Price

If you are doing machine design, frames and structures, IronCAD does 90%+ of what Solidworks or Solid Edge does for you. This article is a technical evaluation rather than a sales summary, but after seeing all of the technical capabilities, your next question should be “yeah, but how much?” Price is certainly a part of the research you should be doing if you are looking for a replacement tool.

Price is a big part of what makes IronCAD look so attractive and practical. As usual, pricing is always vague and they make it so you have to talk to a shmarmy sales guy to figure out what you really want, but I was able to decipher this much: You can get IronCAD Inovate (yes, all the marketing materials spell it that way) and IronCAD Mechanical together for less than $2000. Annual maintenance is less than $500. The Design Collaboration Suite includes IronCAD, IronCAD Inovate, IronCAD Draft and IronCAD Compose, and this goes for about $4k. The point here is that you can get just the simple modeler for very little investment, or you can pay as much as you like for a more comprehensive package. On the other hand, it’s hard to distinguish exactly what package does what, it’s hard to say what the minimum is that you need to buy. Even with the free 30 day license, I can’t tell exactly what I have, although I can see that I do have the IC Mechanical add-in. I assume I have everything on offer. Why would you make it look less complete than it is?

Sales guys always seem to need to exert some arbitrary control. Must be compensating for something…

Dual Kernel

One of the unique aspects of this implementation is that IronCAD allows you to choose which kernel (ACIS or Parasolid) to use for particular features. In the training videos the presenter changed to ACIS for a couple of particular features, one of which was subtracting extruded text from a body. It wasn’t explained in detail why it was done this way, it could have been a simple demonstration that it can be done.

One situation in which ACIS might be an advantage is importing and editing *.SAT files from an Autodesk application. For most other situations, Parasolid is the kernel to pick.

Libraries

The IronCAD Mechanical 2022 add-on is in part a collection of libraries. IronCAD makes extensive use of libraries to reuse common data. The difference between IronCAD and some of the more sophisticated packages is just that – the level of complexity. IronCAD makes it possible to do what you want to do without too much fiddling with the levers.

You can build parts up from scratch with standard Intellishapes to add or remove. If most of your parts are some flavor of rectangular, dragging library shapes from a palette onto the part might be a lot faster than sketching and extruding features.

The training videos seem to encourage the user to save existing work to the libraries to be able to reuse it later. Data reuse is highly efficient, and in structural work, you will tend to use the same kinds of features or combinations of features over and over again. One of the combinations saved was an assembly feature hole with a PEM fastener in a sheet metal assembly. That is a highly reusable combination. Solidworks can do this, but it’s an advanced setup, and requires Toolbox integration.

Direct and Feature based Design

There are some familiar themes at work in IronCAD. Many aspects of this software you will find exactly mirror other software packages. For example, the idea of putting together direct modeling and feature based design has worked well for Solid Edge Synchronous Technology, and gives IronCAD parts and assemblies a unique ease of creation and editing. In fact, comparing the IronCAD and Solid Edge implementations of these ideas makes the technique more realistic for application to real design. IronCAD certainly has jargon and specialized terminology, but I think you will find less of it, and that just means its easier to concentrate more on the design than on the tools.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the IronCAD Tri-ball looks and works in many ways like the Solid Edge Steering Wheel. It’s not hard to see where the inspiration for the bulk of Synchronous Technology came from.

The big deal here is that IronCAD simplifies everything so you don’t have to think about what technology you’re using or how to use it. It’s easy to get caught up in the CAD philosophy of how and why, but with IronCAD, there’s no – or let’s just say less –  drama required.

We have been conditioned to think that CAD has to be complex. And that has really worked. How many careers does the complexity of CAD support? IronCAD isn’t as basic as Sketchup, it is as powerful as it needs to be to do actual engineering design work. You can push and pull faces or you can drag and drop shapes or you can sketch and extrude features. You can surely find things that it can’t do, but can you find things that it can’t do that it actually needs to do?

Planes???

One thing you might notice after watching an hour of demo videos is that the presenter never reaches for a tool to create or even select a plane. How can you model real parts without planes? Entire design philosophies exist that are fully dependent on planes. Well, it turns out you can do that, and do it pretty nicely. Finished products have no planes. Why spend so much time on a class of features that are not an actual deliverable?

Having used the Solid Edge Steering Wheel a fair bit, the IronCAD Tri-ball looked familiar, and you can use many of the same techniques to avoid the need for planes. This isn’t something they go out of their way to point out in the demos, but it was definitely something you will notice. Even a sweep along a complex helical curve creates its own plane perpendicular to the end of the curve for the sweep profile.

Assemblies vs Parts vs Bodies

IronCAD main environment is called a Scene. There are no assemblies or parts files. I get the idea that there is no concept of bodies, since you can just make parts in the scene and join them. You can do subassemblies, and it is possible to move parts in and out of subassemblies. Also there are separate drawing files. IronCAD has fantastic mass drawing creation tools, with creating all drawings as sheets in an assembly drawing. There were some markup tools that I never got to, but they look pretty strong.

History? Direct?

IronCAD does have a feature tree, but the sample parts I have are a series of drag-and-drop blocks (Intellishapes) and cuts. Each shown in the tree has a sketch associated with it that you can edit. So it seems to be history-based in this respect. I know it can also work in a direct edit sort of way with imported data. Editing the Intellishapes works similar to Instant3D in SolidWorks, which I know doesn’t help because no one uses it. Instant3D is a way to make editing sketch-driven features look like direct edit. It’s not direct edit, just looks like it. Checks that box for the uninquisitive.

And then I did the old trick with cutting a hole in a shelled part and reordering the cut. So yes, it works like a history-based modeler in that respect – it shelled out around the cut.

But then something a little disappointing. I brought in a Parasolid file and edited it. The feature tree looks like it just adds another Extrude feature with a sketch to make the edit. So that tells me it’s not real direct editing. And indeed, you can take the feature off of the end where it was created and put it somewhere else, whether that makes sense or not.

This leads to another issue. In the training/demo videos, they often talked about being able to avoid dependencies and limiting parent/child history problems. This certainly does that, but whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is I guess up to you, and how close to the Pro/E ultimate control paradigm you like to keep things.

Buuuut… If you use a Move Face on the Intellishape, it dumbs the solid down to a BREP body, and still allows you to make a change, but this time without adding any features. So, yes, IronCAD does do direct modeling.

Further, there are a set of tools labeled Direct Edit. But, Solidworks also has a set of tools called Direct Edit. I also have an ostrich named Sandwich. Having tools with names doesn’t mean the tools do what the name suggests. The SolidWorks Direct Edit tools add features to the part. IronCAD does that with the Intellishape parts, but if you use a Direct Edit tool on an Intellishape, it will convert the body to BREP. Which is pretty much what Solid Edge does, but the terminology there is to convert from Ordered to Synchronous body.

Also, there are some interesting options in the Offset Face dialog. Offset Face is a Direct Edit tool, but notice you have the option to apply it to the Intellishape – so you can use it like a Direct Edit or like a history-based feature.

The one other thing I wanted to mention here is that do you notice how much like an old version of SW the interface icons in the IronCAD dialog look?

What Features does IronCAD have?

The thing is that IronCAD has all the features you need. It might not have some of the more esoteric things, but I want to stress, it has essentially 3 ways of working:

• Drag/Drop, Intellishapes, primitives

• Traditional sketch and feature
• Direct Edit

The thing it is missing is reference geometry, but they expect you to use the Tri-ball to select any item you need as reference. It really works.

IronCAD also has a full complement of surface features, and remember, the surfacing is powered by Parasolid.

Assemblies probably don’t work the way a Solidworks user might expect them to. They are very dumbed down. You can use mates, but they actually seem to discourage that. IC seems to subscribe to the “put it where you want it and leave it there” school of thought for building assemblies. Which is ok, there are options in SW that do that (Use For Positioning Only).

IC has assembly features which work well with other library features and parts. And remember that it only has one environment which it calls a “Scene”. No parts or assemblies files. There are separate files for drawings.

Sheet metal tools look pretty good. How often do you use Lofted Bend anyway? But it’s there, so if you ever do need it…

There’s a set of architectural tools, stair wizard. I can imagine that for structural framing this is the tool to have. I haven’t really delved into the weldments and structural side of this too much since that’s not my specialty, but there are an excessive number of tools relating to structure, trimming, extending, mitering, BOMs… You get the idea.

How Much Complexity do you Actually Need?

IronCAD may have been developed before its time. Pro/ENGINEER was the king of complex processes to make even simple geometry. Solidworks and Solid Edge simplified the processes to some extent, but have retained much of the complexity and even some of the rigid process required.

IronCAD would have done better if it were introduced now in 2022. It would look like ground breaking software that further lowered the bar for training and conceptual development. Spend less effort on the tools, more on the design. But because it was introduced in 1998, it is easier to dismiss it as just too weird instead of simply embracing the ease of use and weirdness.

So many of the complexity issues that users have with mid-range CAD are solved in IronCAD. Software can’t be great if it isn’t complicated, right? Well, it turns out that your CAD doesn’t really need or benefit at all from that complexity. Let’s take a look at the complexity items that just go away when the software is designed properly:

• Planes, reference geometry
• in-context references
• keeping references intact
• file management
• design intent
• tangled dependencies
• feature order
• editing sketches under features in the tree

As simplified as much of the functionality seems, there is a surprising depth of tools, including emboss, wrapping curves on faces, surface modeling tools, sheet metal and sheet metal forming tools, as well as bulk drawing creation and template/title block customization, and a lot more.

IronCAD Mechanical vs Toolbox vs Standard Parts

Ok, so now you are familiar with IronCAD in general, and we can compare the Mechanical add-on to Toolbox and Standard Parts. While there is a lot of capability in the Mechanical add-on that is not directly related to libraries,  let’s just limit the discussion to the screw library,

The mainstream CAD tools, and I say this with all the love possible, mainstream CAD got excessively caught up in the literalism of 3D CAD. It’s tempting, right? You want to put the helical threads on those screws (and it’s an option!), but its just not necessary. You want all of the literal detail of the screws, including the details of size, geometry, and files. But again, it isn’t necessary. All that you really need from the fasteners is:

• fastener type
• size
• material
• locations
• count for the assembly

And all of this information can be available as meta data. You don’t need a detailed model of each specific size. A visual is nice, a mass calc is nice, but you don’t need the other details.

Anyone who knows Toolbox knows that getting it set up properly is an exercise in understanding the mistakes that other people have made with it for decades. The unnecessary details made the entire tool (and much automated functionality in associated Hole Wizard) nearly unusable. If you got the settings wrong, you could lose all of the fastener information in any assembly (mostly due to the inconsistent distribution of size configurations). Anyone who knows Standard Parts knows that again, setup can be difficult, and it can take up an amazing amount of disk space.

Instead of creating all of these problems for your automated libraries, just realize that you really don’t need detailed geometry or individual files/configurations, because you’re not 3D printing screws, you’re not even CNCing screws. File management on library files is immense overkill. You just need the meta data, which comes out of IronCAD as text in a BOM table. Let me say that again because some of you didn’t pay attention the first time. All you really need for the fasteners is a few lines of text in the assembly drawing BOM.

Display and View Rotation

The display by default uses a little bit of perspective, which to me shows the ID background of the product. Also, it worked right out of the box with my 3D Connexion spaceball.

IC doesn’t seem to have RealView type of display quality, but it does allow for Keyshot rendering, has zebra stripes, draft analysis, and a lot of things you’ve come to expect, like Shrink Wrap, Clearance Check, Isolate, hide/show, promote and demote subassemblies.

Summary

There is a lot to go on about with IronCAD. All the big parts are there. It’s a little quirky, and very flexible. A lot of the functions are somewhat simplified. I wanna guess that 75% of CAD users don’t do or don’t need anything that’s not in here. I haven’t been thorough by any means, that would take a solid week or two to go through everything here, and to try it out myself. If my company needed general CAD, I’d give this a hard look, especially at some of the less expensive versions.

If for whatever reason, you think it’s time to switch CAD systems, you need to give IronCAD and Solid Edge a serious look. Solid Edge is going to have more detailed control, but IronCAD is going to allow more flexibility with less rigid structure.

Did I mention lots of training videos?

If you do welded structures and frames you should have this. Maybe that where the name comes from. If you make porches, decks or picnic tables, again, this stuff is brilliant. The sheet metal tools look great, and as easy to use as Solid Edge sheet metal, but I haven’t tried to break it yet. It will also work for machined parts, and I’d be willing to bet you can make it work for plastics and castings. Surface repair? Sure.

Getting in and playing with it, it looks like a great package for the more rectilinear end of design. It’s simple so its easy to learn. This is the kind of stuff I’ll bet you could learn to get results very fast. Do you really need all the complexity you’re dealing with now? Maybe simplification is not such a bad thing. You owe it to yourself to check it out.