The Value of Using Multiple CAD Tools

For so long in my career I considered proficiency on a single CAD tool to be kind of a goal. My very first CAD experience was on CAD Key because that’s what the school I went to used to teach introductory CAD drafting. That’s ok, I didn’t know any better. I didn’t really know that there were multiple kinds of CAD or that CAD users tend to feel like they are playing for a team, and become very partisan about this kind of thing. We did 3d, but it was 3d wireframe. Prehistoric, but it opened my eyes to actual CAD work.

Then I moved to AutoCAD because that’s what the company used that first hired me as an intern. I got really fast at hot keys and generally drawing using the keyboard. Knowing and programming hotkeys was a point of pride, and being able to speed through them was something I worked at daily. I was on Team AutoCAD for a while for sure. Again, I didn’t really know there were other products.

I eventually got Mechanical Desktop, which was a very bad 3D modeler back in the 1993-94 time frame. It was the first of the so-called mid-range Windows modelers before things like Solidworks and Solid Edge came out. It was terrible, crashed constantly, still relied on AutoCAD V10 or 12 at that time, I think. I was using a bootlegged pre-release version, but it got me hooked on 3D solids.

While using AutoCAD I started to see the value of having or at least knowing how to use multiple CAD products. Sometimes you needed to convert your data for different purposes, and you didn’t always have exactly the tool that you needed. We made solder silk screens for putting solder paste on circuit boards. We weren’t able to export what we needed directly from AutoCAD, so there was some sort of Gerber translator involved.

Then for a short time I used ME-10, ME-30 and a product called CoCreate Solid Designer. These were initially HP products, and very different from AutoCAD. I got the feeling while using these that it would be in bad taste to say that AutoCAD was better, even though my personal results in AutoCAD came faster than in those other products. So there was some sort of hierarchy in the CAD world that I was going to have to learn. And AutoCAD was at the bottom, or near the bottom right next to CAD Key.

While using the HP products, I started to evaluate Solidworks 96. It was simpler, easy to understand, and I was pretty much able to teach myself how to use it by going through all of the entries in a simplistic Help file. At this point, I was on Team Solidworks. Even after I started to learn about other tools like Pro/E, Unigraphics, SDRC, ComputerVision and more, I still had this kind of team loyalty to a single brand.

It’s understandable that if you put a lot of time and effort into learning a particular tool, you want to benefit from your knowledge about how to use that tool. Also you develop a bit of excitement from learning. That’s important. And so is momentum. It’s important to spend a stretch of time learning a particular tool and getting good at it. There is a lot of value in attaining skills, regardless of which tool you are using.

And there’s no doubt that this stuff is kind of addictive in it’s own way. For people who really thrive on 3D visualization, CAD is like cat nip. You get silly and make bad decisions when you’re around it. Anything to spin that model.

But… In the long haul, broadening your horizons and understanding the CAD world from more than just a single point of view has proved to be overall more satisfying, more profitable, and emotionally more fulfilling. In fact, most CAD users eventually grow up and branch out into more of the engineering world at large to start building stuff, not just spinning 3D models.

When you’re young, it’s ok to get caught up in it all, because you have to develop a base of knowledge, and doing that with enthusiasm is definitely the way to go. But it’s easy – too easy – to get stuck in a rut. Even if it’s a big rut, seeing the world from a single point of view all the time is not good. It’s not good for your head, it’s not good for your skills, it’s not good for your career. I would like to believe that loyalty is a good thing, but in the end, the company behind the software tool is is only going to be loyal to you as long as it is convenient for them, so be careful of how much energy you put into loyalty to a product or a company you don’t work for directly.

This is why I’ve opened up in recent years to explore interesting technology, regardless of the source. I’ve written a lot about Solidworks with the Solidworks Bible series, the Mastering Solidworks, this blog and a bunch of online magazine articles, but that is all old news. Also, the product is on the down-swing, so it’s really time to select something else. Unless of course, you really like the 3dx stuff for some reason.

I’ve written a fair bit about Solid Edge mostly because of the Synchronous Technology. I would like to write about NX as well, as it has a slightly different take on Synch, but I just haven’t taken the opportunity yet. And I should add that Synchronous and direct edit in general is a very underappreciated technology. It’s relatively simple, and for the type of machine design that most CAD users do, it’s really the best tool.

I still remember trying to learn history-based modeling. It was a bit confusing at first. These days trying to un-train someone in history modeling to help them understand direct edit is the hard part.

Lately I’ve written a lot about Shapr3D, which is very interesting, especially from the UI point of things. Great stuff for conceptual modeling and visualization. It has a very intuitive interface driven by touch-based hardware. You may see more of this as time goes on from me.

Cloud CAD is certainly important because there are so many tools today that rely on the cloud. It hasn’t been the transformative pied piper that industry optimists were trying to push. Local cloud is the big winner, which is kind of a middle ground between big boy cloud (Amazon, Microsoft et al) and local installations. But still, this only really works for large companies. Local install is still where it’s at for small business.

There are also cloud hybrids where your data is in the cloud, but your executables are local. Or your licensing is in the cloud, or other mixes of local and cloud operation and data storage. Ultimately you have to decide who really owns your data especially once you stop paying to use the software, and how valuable is that data. The idea of owning software tools is unfortunately long gone for many applications.

And there are other things where I’ve branched out from typical CAD technology, such as subd modeling, mesh models, 3D scan data, visualization and more. To play in this space you really have to understand all of the options and thoroughly understand what the upside and downside is to every issue from every point of view. Unfortunately, going down that rabbit hole gets you very far away from creating models, making designs, manufacturing products and the type of work that most of us are so eager to do.

It’s important to see some of these other tools and methods because without them, you’d be tempted to think that all interface works like Solidworks. You’d be tempted to think that imported geometry should be called dumb. You might think that all CAD data should be kept in individual files. You’d be tempted to think that making features in an ordered list was the best way to work with CAD geometry. In short, you’d miss out on a lot of different and better ways of working.

You don’t want to spend your whole career in a rut, and then be stuck in that rut when it came time to make a change, would you?