What problems should your CAD vendor be solving for you?
SolidWorks recent development resources are reportedly being used to develop IT answers to questions you may not have asked. People buy CAD software for several reasons, but I would guess that the most common reason is for use as a tool to develop product geometry, document the geometry, and prepare for manufacturing. CAD data is near the headwaters of the product development data stream, and there are a lot of valid downstream uses for the geometric data. You can make renderings, stress and motion analysis, create assembly instructions, write CNC toolpaths, attach meta data to the geometry, markup 2D or 3D images for revisions, and lots more.
CAD is definitely not the end of the line, or even the real beginning. There are a lot of opportunities for software development around the product development team. Here are some of the things I need CAD software to do – or some things I need to do with my CAD data. Do you have a list of stuff too?
- better idea generation tools – fast, visual, 3D
- better means to reuse results of idea generation in software more intended for accurate and detailed development and documentation
- I could really use a great (free) on-line viewer and markup for CAD data
- better 3D data reuse in general, and in particular a less cumbersome means to reuse mesh data
- more reliable software
- better control of the history tree
- better geometry diagnostics
- more reliable, controllable and flexible geometry creation methods
- more control over external references
- more reliable sketch relations and assembly mates
- bigger selection of real-world mechanical features, like a thread wizard, better shelling tools, a screw boss feature (as an option in the mounting boss feature)
If you look at the 2012 top 10 list, you don’t see people asking for sustainability software, cloud storage, or software to make a bad guess at how much something will cost to manufacture. You see people asking for CAD functions. Geometry creation, control, management, and documentation. Why has CAD development died if paying customers are still asking for it? Why are they trying to re-implement decades old IT scenarios when what we need from them is CAD? At a time when bandwidth caps are being enforced even for land line internet connections, and when you have never been able to buy a more powerful desktop computer for under $2000, who is pushing applications onto the cloud? Does it make sense for small companies to do product development in that environment?
Tell us what functions you bought CAD software for in a comment.
The models look great but the stability is terrible. In principle, I should have been able to move the nose gear box 2 inches and the model would rebuild. I am spending 60% of my time repairing models due to: flipped trims, flipped radius curves, impossible dimensions, unsuitable geometry, refused chamfers, impossible rounds, reversed projections, failed knits, unsolvable relations, curves that cannot be converted to splines, easy sweeps that fail, and sweeps the wiggle and waggle.
What is a sweep? What should it do? I had imagined that the swept sketch was on a plane that would follow the path maintaining perpendicularity, and maintaining pierce relations, and internal sketch relations. The resulting surface would be like a wake of the sketch. Where does the crazy wiggling, twisting, and snags come in?
What happened to the old SolidWorks philosophy of focus on CAD? Let third party solution partners do all of these other bells and whistles niche products
I just wonder how many users use sustainability tool? Is there anyone who actualy benefited from that?
@matt
I am one of the early adopters of SolidWorks and have been using SW since 1997. Before SW, I had been considering UNIX solutions that were $50-60,000 (hardware and software) and was blown away when I could get SW + hardware for about $10,000. And the sheet metal capabilities of SW resulted in production cost savings that paid back my initial investmet in less than one year. I was new to 3D CAD and if SW had bugs or didn’t function perfectly was beyond my concerns. The software was doing everything and more than I expected.
That was then and this is now. Almost 15 years later, maintaining the basic core functionality of SW would have cost almost $20,000 (15 yrs x $1300/year). For me the basic SW package does not do much more for me now than it did 15 years ago. I still design sheet metal parts that my fabricators improve upon with their expertise. Having the latest version of SW would not change that business parametric. For the most part I am a conceptual guy, not a hard core manufacturing guy. In fact, when I have to produce production quality input for the shop, I agonize over every detail, and inspect every matching bolt hole and hope it really turns out that way.
SolidWorks has become much more than just a CAD system for me. I use Flow for product design as much as I use the basic SW CAD package. And once again, there was great value in the initial purchase. But the incremental improvements are hard to justify. Product improvement seems to happen very slowly at SW, probably because they are investing the resources to develop other “new” applications. But while this is of benefit to some of their customers and potential customers, I suspect it more positioned to attract new customers. And certainly, they, like all other software developers are in a life and death struggle to keep up with the advances in hardware. I think the parasolid kernal is becoming very dated along with history based modeling. Design products of the future will have the ability to leverage the latest in computer technology such as multi-core processing and cloud resources.
Now, after using SW almost 15 years, it feels more like driving my Toyota than my Porsche. Lot’s of annoying things, most of which have work arounds. But when the Property Manager screen pops up in front of a dialogue screen, and I have to close the dialogue screen (dims for example) just to move the Property Manager…….. This is the kind of small stuff that just should not exist in a 17 year old product. Or maybe I should have described SolidWorks more like a Citroen than a Porsdhe.
I have just switched from SW2009 to SW2012 and I hardly notice any difference in sketch/feature creation. The main differences I noticed are much more add-ins (sustainability shit etc.), little faster opening/recalculation times and larger files,….YES, larger files!
I am so fossil; I missed the memo. The new customer base for Solidworks does not need geometery creation. The products are just widgets with marketing. It is all in the lifelike social media love mark stuff. Better get that IPO expedited before someone finds out that there is no product.
@Matthew West
I can understand and appreciate having a range of customers to look after. And it wouldn’t matter to me at all what you do for them as long as you do stuff for the central base as well. The What’s New lists of the last 4 releases have been pretty much CAD-free, well, 3D modeling free to be more specific. And yes, people have noticed.
Get back to developing CAD so I can get back to griping about bugs. ;o) If the current incarnation of SolidWorks isn’t going to see any more CAD development than we’ve seen in the past 4 years, just stop wasting our time and tell us now. Or maybe that’s what you/SW have been doing.
@matt That wasn’t my intent Matt, and my apologies if anyone may have construed my comments as such. Small customers remain a large part of our customer base, and we remain 100% committed to that market.
All I was trying to say is that we have a much larger range of customers now than in the late 1990s, and we have to balance the needs of small businesses and independent contractors like you (and many of the people who read and comment here) with the needs of medium and large businesses. Our product and R&D teams try extremely hard to ensure that the new updates in every release benefit the widest range of customers possible.
@Matthew West
Matt, if you’d like a little friendly advice, it’s not a great idea to come to a hangout of independents and tell them that the door is closing to the folks who put SW on the map in the first place. I can’t think of a better way to chase away business. Be aware that for every person who comments here there are 100s who are reading.
Well yes thats true Matthew. I will be giving a talk about SE to Tenessee VoTech in Nashville in January because they are using SW but for some strange reason they want to see SE from an actual user. But then thats not Twitter or Facebook or forums. Thats just future job seekers. SW is disconnecting from what made them great.
@Mark Landsaat
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, forums, etc. There are lots of places that people talk about SolidWorks besides Matt’s blog.
On another note, Tsplines is about to release an intermediary version of their software, 3.3. It has a ton of new very useful geometry manipulation/creation features. The reason I mention it here is because they are very much in touch with their users.
The new geometry features come directly from end user wishes and the 3.3 version is a free upgrade to anyone already owning a TSplines 3 license.
Maybe Tsplines can do this because they are a small and young company, but it’s really nice to work with them. They listen, they are responsive, they are innovative and they make a great product. It’s not free of its faults and flaws, but I really do get the sense they are interested in making a better product for their customer.
When year after year I see user requested changes that are in the top twenty don’t make it in the next release of SolidWorks, the only thing I can do is shake my head. Why do we even take the time to vote on a top twenty if the enhancements that are requested get ignored, yet we do get things like costing, sustainability, large assembly review etc.
If you want an example of enhancements requests that never make it. Conics with rho control, and more assembly functionality at the assembly level, such as cut with surface, cut with body, cut sweep, cut loft.
@Matthew West
“For example, for every negative comment I’ve seen about the new costing tool, I’ve probably seen four positive ones”
Hmmm, ok so where are those users? According to what you say there are four times more people happy about the new costing tool than there are those that are not happy. Plenty of unhappy people here, but I don’t think I have seen one that’s happy. That’s not really adding up, is it?
@Matthew West
Matt, that’s fine. I’m wondering who is going to service your former customers that you don’t seem to take much interest in any longer? Where do you now recommend we go to get CAD solutions?
@matt
I think what you’re seeing reflects the fact that the customer base is much larger and more diverse than it was in the early days. We have more kinds of customers with more and different needs. You can’t say that the needs of an independent contractor or one-seat shop are not different from those of a large multi-national company, because they are. And we have customers that fall into both extremes, as well as the wide space in between.
Just because many of the new functions and features aren’t of immediate value to one kind of customer, that doesn’t mean they’re not of immediate value to thousands of other customers. For example, for every negative comment I’ve seen about the new costing tool, I’ve probably seen four positive ones. European companies are extremely interested in designing for sustainability because of current or pending regulations. Companies with a dozen offices around the world need a good way to manage data. And so on. At the same time some are lamenting the lack of new geometry tools and the increase in peripheral functionality, there are others who are saying “thanks for adding that new capability–I’ve been waiting for it.”
@Asheen
Yeah, costing. Another favorite. It just starts to sound like a broken record and everything SW is trumpeting of late is just another disappointment. I wonder why the company that used to make stuff I was eager to play with every new release now just produces groaning and eye rolling. Costing and Sustainability are definitely product development tasks, but not really CAD tasks, and while still part of “design”, are more on the periphery.
I’m not knocking stuff that is meant to be useful, I’m just mourning the death of SolidWorks dedication to CAD. It’s like you guys hired a bunch of new guys who didn’t like CAD so they decided to make other stuff. General office applications. Stuff for the purchasing office. ERP type functions. Reviving IT trends from the 70s and 80s. Accounting. Anything but CAD. Anything but the central mission that some of us bought the software for.
I used to complain about bugs. But I don’t bother any more because SW didn’t pay much attention. Getting stuff right is apparently not very profitable. When SW was the underdog, you had to do stuff the customer wanted. It was easy to like SW back then. Now you just coast on momentum and it seems like you actively antagonize customers. It’s just disappointing to a guy who at one time was a big fan.
@Matt no tax break. Our view is that sustainable design is and will be increasingly important to more and more of our customers, particularly to engineering managers and executives. You’re free to disagree. My personal view is that if we don’t give it importance, we won’t be here long enough to change our minds, but that’s my personal view.
By the way, I’m not completely dedicated to Sustainability; I’m also our Education product manager. Most of us manage multiple products/initiatives/stuff.
And I didn’t say that sustainability was “more important” than material selection; sorry if you got that impression. It’s rather that sustainability encompasses more than just material selection. At the same token, material selection encompasses way more than sustainability, including engineering specifications, aesthetics, cost, performance in various use environments, etc. We’ve made a lot of other initiatives in those domains, like the new Costing tool.
Cheers,
asheen
@HoffY
Thanks for your explanation, Hoffy. If you need to use those axes often, you can create them only once in a template, can you not?
Sorry Matt, did not want to detour your discussion. 🙂
Hmmmm…yeah I suppose it is a power issue.
Once business gets beyond a critical size, rather than responsible people involved in the original purpose, the job attracts rather dysfunctional sorts who are unhealthy super acheivers. People who need to be someone, sucker and jockey for position on the ladder, be big wheeler dealers…take over the world..
The competitive corporate game becomes the mission and paradoxically both a means of attainment and a prison.
Customers eventually become downtrodden servants of shareholders and finally victims of unchecked stupidity.
Just like in government things become perversely inverted.
People ought to be there to represent their constituants, govern for good purpose and abide by the constitution.
Instead they are self interested, get ahead with corrupt sponsorship, and ignore any rules that don’t suit or reveal their failings.
So it seems the CAD business organisation should be quite flat.
Really the role of management could be just like another service department like janitorial or car pool.
Just have a product publicity and distribution arm?
Take away the avenue for egos to become cloud demagogues.
Take away those presumptive job titles, opulent offices, the excessive pay and bonuses.
Stop listening to people tell us we need them to be our leaders and they know better.
A slave is someone waiting to be set free.
E. Roosevelt I believe 😉
Sorry I don’t remember who it was who told Alexander the Great he was blocking his sunshine…was it CADus SWorkus?..
@Neil
Neil,
Yeah, I think I agree with that. Design by committee. The software used to have a cohesive philosophy, so you could understand how the software thought. Now you’ve got functions implemented by different committees, and everyone has to put their stamp on it. For example, you’ve got 4 different commands you can use to insert one part into another. 4. And they all have a slightly different take on it, have slightly different strengths and weaknesses (and bugs). You’ve got split, insert part, save bodies and insert into new part. Two of them even have almost the same name. 4 different groups of people unaware of what the others are doing create 4 different functions. How does something like that happen? Or you have Modify Sketch, and then also the Move, Copy, Scale… sketch tools. They do the same things, but have different strengths and weaknesses. Why such duplication? Why not just one function that does it all? Just like any other corporate setting, I’m sure it’s mostly about individual egos.
Just the way the money is set up, successful organizations tend to get bigger, whether it’s a good thing or not. Bigger organizations look less and less human. Victims of their own success. I believe large corporations and government have the same kinds of weaknesses and tendencies toward corruption. Not that small companies are immune.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
-John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely.html
@Asheen
Asheen,
This is proof that you guys are really out of touch. You see “sustainability” (which is a comparatively niche concern) as more important than material selection (a far broader topic which concerns many more people). Flair over substance. Sustainability metrics would be a great footnote on a material selection guide that helped with things like porosity, resistivity, UV, moisture absorption, temp sensitivity, mechanical properties, and whatnot.
Funny that you’re the only guy to show up and defend yourself here. You get points for that.
Why don’t they hire a hero to fix Toolbox? Nothing against you personally, but why does something as obscure as sustainability get it’s own hero, but other more important things don’t? This is the kind of thing I just don’t get. Must be a tax break or something.
I thought about this for a while….
I think the most important problem to solve is what happens when vendors get big.
I say that because I think most of the things we discuss here are not uniquely apparent to users.
The real needs are reasonably obvious to anyone with a few clues who sits down to deliver a project with the software.
The vendor should structure their business so it is always driven by practical people who have a genuine hands on interest in engineering and design and want to acheive the maximum possible toward making the best tools available.
When ‘professional’ managers, marketers and bean counters take over they end up screwing it up with excessive organisation, success by textbook methodology and multi department collaborations.
The whole endeavour instead deteriorates into a mediocre smorgasbord of distracted, over studied, self conscious ‘me toos’ rather than quality content.
Success is measured in numbers of seats per quarter, reportable profits and incorporating the latest tech fashion as a demo of prowess whereas it ought to be measured primarily in terms of how well it helped the customer achieve their goals.
We need people who can keep focused on refining features to a high state of usefulness rather than have them bumped on to the next cutesy item to capture 10 seconds of fame come the next release cycle. As Matt wrote do something well rather than cover everything.
The management should serve the coders and the coders should serve engineers.
So the main problem I see and would like solved is how to keep the company fresh and focused like a small operation where people have a good handle on what the user needs and can just do it. 🙂
While Jon H. may have had the right values it wasn’t enough to prevent the mission being ruined by corporatism and neither was the objective commentary from ardent users along the way. Without circumventing this degeneration of purpose, history is going to keep repeating. All user issues flow from this imo.
@Alin
Hi Alin,
Sorry about my rushed description there. Basically what i mean is that if you were to create “assem1” and insert a single component and then try to circular array that component – you can’t do it without creating more geometry… whether it be an axis in the assembly or within the single part that is being arrayed. And this should not be the case. Because you should be able to simply select or specify to use any of the 3 major axies that exist already in every assembly file. But with SW you can’t do that because there are no default axies. And this is the root of all evil in SolidWorks. ITs this very reason that they are missing that is the root cause of all the crap we get downstream with not being able to specify normals etc. Its the most basic concept of a part and its origin and DOF. Just like when you create a plane.. there are no options to define its normal direction. So the software just does whatever it wants. And the same with in mates. If we had normals control just like you logically should (as its undefined as it is!).. then when you create your defined parts or geometry… and it should work fine.. it just goes hay-wire when your assembly moves party way through its DOF.
Drives me crazy. Especially when i need a simple chain style mechanism to work!
How about more robust mirroring? I’m tired of fillets and chamfers that won’t mirror. Also bogus, is the inability to mirror features with end conditions such as “up to surface”. Sure, there are workarounds, but they require special knowledge and they don’t make modeling any easier.
security always an issue, and “cloud” is advancing slower than pundits predicted
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-57338025-61/how-i-did-with-my-2011-cloud-predictions/?tag=rtcol
“‘Sustainability’ as a word focuses on too small a niche of material selection to be useful.”
“Calling it ‘Sustainability’ seems to excuse the fact that it’s a very weak material selection aid.”
Actually, if it were just a material selection aid, then you wouldn’t really need to have it in SolidWorks, would you? You’d run an “environmental material selector” once, find out that aluminum or bamboo or steel or polypropylene or PLA or whatever was the “best” material, and just use that whenever you could. Or slightly more sophisticatedly, you’d generate your material whitelists and blacklists and rank preferences.
Would that it were that simple, but material extraction is only one stage in the product’s lifecycle. When you perform environmental assessments on the full product lifecycle (a process called life cycle assessment or LCA), you typically look at five stages: raw material extraction, part manufacturing, assembly processing, use by the end customer, and disposal. Transportation is also often broken out as a sixth “stage” but in reality it’s considered between each of the five stages.
When LCA is done in the design phase, it’s predictive, e.g. “what would the impact of this product be if I made these design decisions.” (We use industry averaged data from our partner PE International to predict.) Then, we can update it on the fly as you make different decisions — material decisions, sure, but also geometry/weight, manufacturing location, energy consumption, recycled content and eventual recyclability, etc.
It’s these types of decisions that more and more companies are looking at to fuel environmental marketing claims or “green marketing”, i.e. the green circly logo as Steve calls it.
“Isn’t there a guy at SolidWorks who has ‘sustainability’ as a full time job?”
Yep, that’s me.
Cheers,
Asheen
Sustainability Product Mgr
@HoffY
HoffY, can you please elaborate on automatically picking the axis of a sphere. I am not sure I understand the scenario you described.
You probably know that you can select a cylindrical or conical face, or even a circular edge as the input for the axis in a circular pattern.
So, correct me if I’m wrong, but you would also like to be able to select a sphere and the X, Y or Z direction as the input for the axis in a circular pattern.
@Dan Staples
Dan, i agree with Jeff. It would be like having a block.. out of thign air.. turn into a sphere. And a random block… not one you know *could* change to a sphere. Its something entirely out of control of the ‘builder’ regardless of said users skill.. they just can’t prepare for. That is SolidWork’s. Nothing annoys me more then these ridiculous bugs that are so blatantly obvious to REAL users and they just go ignored. Why the hell can’t i specify the +Z direction of a plane???? ffs! Why can’t i specify an circular array axis in an assembly with only one spherical part without having to create a straight edge or axis (umm hello.. what about selecting a default X,Y,Z direction?). its just not good enough and trying to justify this laziness (or anterior motivation like the usual big corp. money mongers that just chase flashy crap to sell to dumb sh**s) on history based being freagile isnt right. It is a sequence of equations that should always end up with teh same asnwer.
Now i’m no Einstein but If it can’t re-calculate this the exact same conclusion with the same values every time… SOMETHING IS SCREWED WITH THE CODE PERIOD!
@Jeff Mowry
Actually, Jeff, that was my point exactly. The architecture of history-based CAD is by definition Jenga — the pieces build on one another. It doesn’t matter how good a Jenga tower creator you are (and I am sure you are quite good), the base architecture of history-based remains Jenga. The CAD vendor can invest to make the pieces heavier, so they are more stable; they can increase the friction of the pieces so they slide off each other less readily; but the base “game” remains the same. It is built as a series of dependent blocks and there is no getting around the fact that sometimes removing and replacing a block with a slightly different one will cause the tower to fall, no matter how much the CAD vendor invests.
Not saying CAD vendors (including me!) shouldn’t continue to work on making stable blocks and increasing the friction and other such good stuff, but history-based can never be completely stable because it is, in the end, Jenga.
Matt points out (and I would concur) there are still some good valid reasons for building a tower. It just shouldn’t be the only thing your toolbox can do.
I want reliable accurate geometry. The feature tree is fine, but I want to organize the tree into folders and subfolders, that represent compact sensible pieces of geometry. I want to project entire sketches on surfaces. I want compact files. I want control of the names of features.
I am beginning to get pissed about the same geometry bugs being around for years. SW cannot do a price list, so fat chance that they can do anything regarding costing. I am getting sick of the worthness CEO speak. Give me geometry, or give me SE.
I like the Jenga analogy. However, my complaint above really wasn’t about the problems arising from a lack of Jenga skills, but the fragility of a system in which flawless Jenga skills can still lead to catastrophe.
Flipping mates, lost or mistracked face IDs, flipped surface trims, and other items really aren’t anything I can find a means of user-control over. If they’re going to happen, it matters not the skills of the user—the user will be hosed. Maybe it’s like somebody coming along and bumping the table during a Jenga game—the more fragile/complex towers are more likely to fall. But it’s really not the fault of the Jenga players in that case. (Yes, sometimes failure IS the fault of the Jenga players, but that’s part of learning how to best play the game. My point here is that Calvinball isn’t part of Jenga.)
@Dan Staples
Yes, yes, and yes.
I’ve heard the Jenga analogy before somewhere, and I agree completely with that point of view. History is indeed a fragile structure to build your company’s important information on, but sometimes, I still think it is the best way. Not all the time, but sometimes. When the relationships break with every other change, for example, history isn’t doing you any favors.
I truly believe that we need both methods (history and direct). History modeling can work better than it does. In order to get there, we need better tools to manage and visualize the history. I think SW could benefit immensely from a set of tools like SE has today. Which you can get without switching to brand new CAD software with a new kernel that runs across the internet and stores your files in a database on some cloud the Chinese have already cracked.
The discussion on trees breaking and being tough to rebuild properly reminds me of what a tough nut this is to crack both for the development community and the end user. The very notion of a history tree is that it completely undoes and redoes itself every time you make an edit. And all the steps prior to any given step have to result in a very predictable outcome for the rest of it to work.
I’ve always described history-based as a recipe. But I had an insight last night after reading this that a history tree is NOT like a recipe. A recipe is followed and generally, assuming you follow the steps right, results in a nice cake at the end. A history tree is much more like Jenga (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenga) where you build a large tower, with each piece depending on the prior blocks. THEN, you pull out one of the blocks (edit something in the tree) which is the object of the game, you hope the tower will not fall, but it often does. And then you end up having to rebuild at least a portion of the tower.
It’s really quite a good analogy the more you think about it. True experts can build really nice Jenga towers that can withstand arbitrary pieces being removed and not fall. Most people build really fragile towers, where any small perturbation can bring the whole thing down. I’m willing to bet most folks on this forum build really good towers, but they still fall down from time to time. Most of the world does not build super great towers in the first place.
Of course, this is part of the reason why Matt has been high on SE of late. You can build a really good Jenga tower if you want (history), or you can build something that looks just like a Jenga tower but is not made up of a bunch of little pieces (Synchronous) or you can build a nice solid base (Synchronous) and stack some blocks on top (mixed). 🙂
@Devon Sowell
I put “Fix Mate Flipping” into the top 10 list on the first day.. Looks like it got deleted! I know it’s a deep kernel issue, but come on!
edit.. ok, apparently it’s not deleted.. https://forum.solidworks.com/ideas/1793
@Steve
Material selection is one of the great unaddressed areas of product development. Being involved in plastics I get asked questions about materials frequently, and I don’t often have the best answer. I guide people to the right ball park, and rely on material experts to fine tune the options.
“Sustainability” as a word focuses on too small a niche of material selection to be useful. If a CAD company could come up with a material database comprehensive enough to be useful, with enough processes to be useful, then it might be … um … useful. But the problem with “80/20” CAD is that they believe half-assed is good enough. Which it isn’t. I don’t know who they’re trying to impress with doing a mediocre job at just about everything they put their hand to, but it doesn’t impress me. At this point they’ve probably got a dozen areas where they have done a truly half-assed job instead of focusing on a couple areas and getting them right, or complete enough for professional use.
The guy doing the product geometry is not always the right guy to assign a material, but sometimes he is. It all depends on the expertise of individuals. I doubt software will ever completely supplant human experience in this area. Material selection is definitely part of the design, but sometimes it has to wait until the FEA is done, or until the molder has a look at it.
In the end, yes, I think a material selection aid is a great thing, and the CAD developer is as good a choice to develop it as anyone. But first of all, call it what it is – a material selection aid. Calling it “Sustainability” seems to excuse the fact that it’s a very weak material selection aid. I’ve tried to use it a couple of times, and couldn’t find the process I was designing for, or had a very limited selection of materials. It’s a superficial effort. Not even 80/20. More like 20/80.
Isn’t there a guy at SolidWorks who has “sustainability” as a full time job? Injection molding and extrusion are not the only plastics processes by far. Blow mold, thermo/vacuum form, rotational mold, gas assist, structural foam, transfer molding, casting for starters are also plastic processes for starters.
To be fair in regards to sustainability, you might not see it on the top 10 list but there’s definitely pressure in larger companies to make sure there’s green circly logos on stuff.
Product developement and manufacturing are the only reasons I have CAD. There are no other reasons to go through the aggravation of learning and using this stuff. Without having investigated I am certain there are plenty of development tools for artists and product concept types where appearance is important and not precise data, which is a lot more trouble to create.
If I can’t have good geometry creation tools in my software of choice there is no reason for me to be there. It is the only tool set of importance to me.
My best guess is that the existing DS SolidWorks code is bloated and dated. Otherwise, these important CAD geometry tools would have already been fixed or created.
Specifically such items as flipping geometry, flipping mates, poor curve tangents, large file sizes resulting in long Open/Rebuild times and slow transfer times, erratic external relationship management and Feature Tree snafus have been around as long as I’ve used DS SolidWorks (1999). Yeah they’re better, but still a big problem.
DS SolidWorks has what? 800 employees? Since they can’t/won’t fix the CAD geometry tools, it appears they’d rather try to provide answers to questions that aren’t being asked to keep the workers occupied.
DS SolidWorks used to be exciting and leading edge, now it’s just old, boring and dated, like General Motors in the 1980’s.
Devon Sowell
I need complex features that don’t break. Features cannot be as fragile as they are today. Having things like surface Trims, Deleted Faces, and other things breaking during rebuild—sometimes permanently—is catastrophic to work flow.
And these things aren’t breaking because I’m using questionable methodology in creating geometry. I’m not. I’m an expert in creating complex geometry with SolidWorks—and making that geometry able to be manufactured inexpensively. Geometry, once created, really needs to stay that way. Inexplicable breakage cannot be accounted for in hourly billing or busting quoted budgets, yet somebody’s got to eat it. Who do you think does that?
Well, I guess you wrote yourself what users are thinking about :), I dont thinki there is much more to tell to these guys than: Work on the software not everything else or you ll soon be history (you have example of that right nearby, just look at the competition that starts with a C,..or should I say what used to be your competitition and started with a P) 🙂