A SolidWorks Performance Story.

I assume circular detail views wouldn't be adequate? They are alot less
resource intensive.

 

For a detail view we do use the circular details. Cropping comes in
when you want to bump up the scale of a drawing to see sub components.
For example if we have a few parts that are to be indicated on a
vehicle you may show a view of the vehicle, set a scale that is
appropriate and then crop it because the ends are hanging off the
sheet.

How about broken views? We use those too. Maybe for a piping run that's
long you'd break it. This doesn't seem to slow things down though but
it does have it's own problems with center lines and other things.

 

How are you modeling those holes?

BTW, Have you tried your parts on someone else's
system? Like your vendor's?

I've seen flaky disks, network cards, network cables
& connections. All make for retransmits or added read requests.
Same (disk) for fragmented files. Or fragmened applications
software ..... running that locally or is it being served too?

IIRC You also only have 1 MB of memory .. getting a lot of
disk thrashing & swapping? Add more memory.

 

Holes are Hole Wizard holes if they're tapped and a cut extrude circle
if it's a clearance hole.

Once we ran a large assy on our VAR's computer at his office. It was a
bit faster but he also had the latest skookum computer that was newer
than ours.

Like I said in an earlier post, these problems have also been similar
between different employers I've worked at over a few years. The
products, BOM structures, assemblies, drawings and such forth are
similar and so are the problems.

I have 1GB of RAM as mentioned, no swapping activity to speak of.

 

If you can muster doing 3D in SW and 2D in Autocad I think you'll
have

Brian,

I love the fireworks that this post has generated. I totally agree
with you on this point. The SW 2d is quite anemic. Solidworks should
be happy that nobody at adesk is market savvy enough to integrate IV
with the Acad drafting environment. In any case, I too was a
tool-designer (progressive, form, compound, and I even once did a brake
tool - LOL!).

We did exculsively do our tools in acad because simply put, there was
no reason not to. Solidworks was too slow, too cumbersome and frankly
too parametric to be useful for many of the simple tasks that we needed
to do. The economy of 2D drafting still exists - time is still as
valuable as it has ever been.

Usually when one suggests that Acad is better at some tasks than
solidworks, one gets accused of not knowing alot about the software,
being a noob and so on. This makes me laugh. Usually it comes from
the havn't-been-there-havn't-done-it sement (I mean tool design: how
many who responded negatively have actually designed _any_ progressive
die, start to finish? few I bet). The 2d drafting still offers the
best economy for many things, especially stamping tools.

Take a simple stick punch layout - pretty east to manually manipulate
all your stick punches into a coherent wire edm layout with acad. Try
that with solidworks and you need an assembly, a bunch of mates, a lot
of needless tweaking all so you can import it via DXF out to a wire
programming software (HEHEHE). Strip layout is another area where acad
excels - need a scallop cut, make one need to add material to make a 45
degree cut-by make it for that station only.

But I must confess that solidworks was an absolute necessity for part
flat development (probably not as simple for you circumstances where
trial & error is the most likely method anyone will eventually use),
skeletal strip development, and parametric "always the same" features
(i have a thing that draws you a sweet side view with timing, perf &
pilot size & advance and so on). Solidworks saved 4-8 hours a tool
simply because we could generate these things in an hour or so using
SW.

The moral of the story was that we, like you, found fully 3d modeled
tools simply impractical. We cranked out prog dies in 20-160 hours
based on the complexity and we would have incresed our times by %30
easily using "pure" 3d modeling. The trick was using the right tool at
the right time. Solidworks is HORRIBLE at doing line-art - I much
prefer corel draw. Autocad STINKS at part development, I perfer
SolidWorks. 2D is absolutely the least developed element of
solidworks, sometimes I prefer autocad.

I have been a product designer & a tool designer. Strangely, as a tool
designer, I still prefer autocad. Why? I can cover the most ground
quickly, accurately and complete a tool with clean detailing and no
fussing. Tool designs do get HUGE sometimes, even in acad - i have had
a few with 10,000+ lines. But when doing products (and fixtures), I
prefer SolidWorks and would use nothing else.

To a man with a Hammer, every problem is a Nail. Luckily, you (and I)
also have a nice crescent wrench in our toolbox when the hammer will
not do the best job - I suspect that many of us are in this position.
Anyone who thinks that anhy of the stuff is prefect for everything is
likely deluding themselves. I must say that since I stopped doing tool
design full time, my hands don't tingle anymore (less autocad).

In any case, you are not alone, but don't throw in the towel yet.

Later,

SMA

 

Sean-Michael Adams:

Thanks for the support! You are on the same wave length as most of us
working in the real world trying to meet customer demands at the same
time trying to intergrate a new design process. I would also like to
mention that I'm not totally biased towards any CAD package at all. I
just need one that works all the time, wether that meens using
SolidWorks for 3D and Autocad for 2D or whatever. Solidworks as a total
solution for our industry has not proven itself with us, and you're
right Sean, I'll spend 15 minutes waiting for SolidWorks to rebuild my
2D sheets because I lengthened a parallel when I could have stretched
it in Autocad in 2 Sec. The flip side with our old process; to give
some credit back to SolidWorks; is that we have a horrible time
surfacing in Autocad for our CNC'd form blocks. We use PowerShape for
our surfacing package. So maybe there isn't one surefire package that
can marry both 2D speed with 3D functionality. Those claims are
definitely made by SolidWorks Reps however.

 

Forgive me, since of course I don't know the exact nature of your job and
the cropped views but would it be a possibility to make a view on the sheet
you are speaking of of the whole assembly and then using a detail view just
move the parent view off of the sheet and scale the detail view to suit the
sheet, and remove the detail view label. This should be conciderably faster
than Cropped views.

Corey

 

You can then hide the parent view, (I forgot to mention that)

 

Yes, that would be a workaround for most cropped views. It's silly that
we need to do things like that though .

 

Yes, that would be a workaround for most cropped views. It's silly that
we need to do things like that though .

 

We have found that flexible assemblies will bring SWX to it's knees...
it just seems that it is too much for it to handle.

We use them occasionally just to test our design andf then turn them off
when we're done. This has spead things up considerably compared to
having them on.

Hope this helps

 

Brain,

If you use any out of the box Parametric modeler to do progressive die
design, you will have the same frustration in performance. Progressive
die design will create lots of associativities in the assembly:
1. A cutting punch will create offset relation inside the assembly for
punch holder; stripper; die plate; backup and die set.
2. A clearance for forming will create sketch external references.
3. A fastener will create holes on different plates and centre and size
will also create associativity.

To design progressive die effectively, you must have vertical solution
to make your life easier. In 2D world, most people using Diemaker or
Striker in order to make them more productive both in design and
drafting of progressive die design. In 3D world, most of the systems
have solution for progressive die design.

SolidWorks - 3DQuickPress; LogoPress
Pro/E - PDX
UG - PDW
Visi - VisiProgressive

All these programs are designed for progressive die design to release
the pain you have right now. 3D for progressive die design is not easy
at all without vertical solution.

George.

 

Well written Matt, I can only add, is that I have 6 years in SW and 0
experience with AutoCAD. One day, a few years ago, a co-worker of mine was
away and called me at work to open an AutoCAD file of his on his computer
and print it out for another co-worker. I opened Mechanical Desktop (MD) and
then open the file. Then I just went by myself to print it and it was so
bizarre - I couldn't figure out how to do it. So my co-worker walked me
through it step by step. Now talk about a confusing unproductive program! As
soon as I hung up with him, a fellow SW co-worker and I tried to make the
simplest thing in MD and it was so weird. We never were able to make
anything and I could not believe the complexity just to rotate a part or
measure something.

When the MD person got back to work, I asked him to make some 3D models in
MD so I could see what it took. Boy, if someone thinks MD is an improvement
over SW, I feel sorry for him.

That's my 2 cents....

Dan Bovinich
www.SWcad.com

 

Your right George. We did have initial problems with that and thats a
whole differn't story to be covered. We had alot of associativity
errors in the beginning but became very proficient with the software.
I can honestly say that it's a rare occasion to have any errors in our
die assemblies since changing our assemblty thinking. You definitely
have to pay attention to the items you listed. The awareness regarding
assembly structure and of course the use of sub-assemblies has helped
tremendously. The fact still remains however that the performance is
still not up to par on the 2D side. Maybe including an add-in such as
3D QuickPress or LogoPress will aid in the automation of some of our
tasks, but will it increase SolidWork's much needed improvements in its
2D environment? That much may have to be seen to be believed. We have
kicked around the idea to get some demos in on those add-ins. It seemed
like Logopress was fairly new to our reseller when we first Demo'd SW.
We are very interested in UG's PDW, but theres a financial draw back to
UG so we'll wait and see.

 

Just out of curiosity, how many springs in the assy do you have modeled as
helical sweeps? If you RMB on the name of the assy in the feature mgr, and
select "Show update holders", how many do you have? How many circular
relations have you modeled in? How many "->?" or "->x" symbols? These are
The primary problems that die designers run into. Unbridled incontext and
infinite detail.


Q

 

http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?threadID=382339

I mean if it "rocks" it must be good, right?