Dassault Systems

It appears to me that Dassault Systems has removed all references to
SolidWorks from their new website.
http://www.3ds.com/home
Best Regards,
Devon T. Sowell
www.3-ddesignsolutions.com

 

still there under corporate>about us>brands.

Chris

 

It took a while, but I found it. End of the list. And if you click on it and
see the SolidWorks page it is lacking in almost any description of what
SolidWorks does while going on at great length about all the peripheral
applications under the SolidWorks brand. Analysis, PDM and Design
Communication and Collaboration standout. Could it be that SW is going to
be sucked up by CATIA?

 

Cosmic Blobs is there.

 

yes, ....you wouldn't really know there was a mid range CAD solution
available from DS looking there would you?

moving a bit sideways from Devon's post-

it was interesting to me to see subdivision of surfaces being used as a
styling tool.
anyone out there used it can tell me if it is as easy to use as it looks?
SW could sure use something like this....kinda reminds me of Blender!
maybe I should move up to Catia...

ok so here is neil's QUESTION OF THE WEEK - when is a midrange program out
of its depth?

in your experience, for what scale of project/type of work is SW an
unreasonable proposition? or conversely could you justify the outlay on
Catia for minor work?
by extension is SW really a lame duck for any industrial design when
considering the standards required for the global market??

I know some people who read here are looking beyond SW or SW/Rhino type
combinations. What is your impression of Catia?
cheers
neil

 

I haven't tried it myself, but watching a fellow from Catia use it, I was
quite impressed. He could quickly generate very nice looking shapes with a
mix of crisp and C2 edges.

We are seriously considering making the move.

Our feeling is that SW is out of its depth on the products we do.
http://www.tdsway.com/products/recon

The problem is not so much in generating nice looking shapes, although that
can be a real pain in the ass, as in making good plastic parts out of them,
with good wall thicknesses, nice radii and consistent offsets. The real
frustration comes when you make a simple change on one end of your part and
have a seemingly unrelated feature on the other end break, followed by hours
of work to fix it.

Then again, maybe it isn't SW but we who are out of our depth. Folks like Ed
Eaton and Paul Salvador can do some mighty nice work with SW.

There is no way to justify Catia for minor work. We are looking at more than
$30K a seat to do the fancy surface work and the normal mechanical
engineering. Naturally enough, management is not very happy about the
increase in investment.

I'll leave that one to the real ID people here.

We've had demos by Pro/E and UGS (NX2 and NX3) as well as Catia. Only the
Catia demo impressed us. The Pro/E people gave us a webcast demo. They
didn't do much homework. We gave them some parts to build that SW had
problems with and they still (many weeks later) haven't given us samples of
what Pro/E can do. The UGS people gave us a real demo, but they weren't very
well prepared and had the same types of trouble as SW has. They also haven't
returned completed models of the second set of problem parts. The Catia
people were well prepared and were able to show us that the software could
quickly generate shapes like the Recon shown on our website. They also
quickly turned around models from the second set of problem parts showing a
couple of different approaches that look easier to implement than our SW
workarounds.

If Catia cost us $10K a seat, it would be a slam dunk. At $20K a seat, I
think we could sell it to our managers without too much trouble. (It
doesn't take too many fully-loaded engineering man-hours to pay off a $15K
investment.) At over $30K a seat, we're seeing some real resistance. (Even
though it takes just 67% more time to pay it off.)

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Hi Jerry,
Looking at the demo of subsurfs it seemed to me that I may be able to create
in a couple of hours what would take me all day in SW messing around with
planes and splines....waiting for rebuilds....repairing the failed bits and
unexpected consequences...SW seems unnecessarily obtuse...the wrong sort of
engine under the hood for swoopy designs...I have noticed asymmetric forms
emerging now in the local marketplace...
If Catia was more productive by a factor of 3 in creating the basic forms
with this approach it wouldn't matter so much about the up front price
differential.
I guess you have looked at migration requirements? what is your impression
of how intuitive will it be for a well healed SW user to come up to speed
with Catia?
thanks
neil

 

I went to a demo of a new product called Impactxoft (www.impactxoft.com) the
other day - it started life as a Catia add-in for 'functional' modelling,
but is now a stand alone item. It appeared to be very quick and very
intelligent for plastic molding and 'touchy feely' product design but I
couldn't see it's application to our business (heavy fabrication and
weldments).

I am not being anti SW but I am a firm believer in the right tool for the
right job.

Cheers

Merry

 

thanks for the link Merry, I tried to view the demos but they ran slowly
even over 1mbit/s line....argh!
the subsurfs ability seems to be the same thing as advertised for Catia.
so how about it SW? next request for ID people....subsurfs. )

 

Looks very interesting. Anyone have any idea about costs?

'Sporky'

 

interesting, I was given a price for IXstyle from Aust distributor that
works out about $50,000 NZD up front plus maint subscription , or
alternatively an ann. fee you mention....this makes it approx 9x cost of
basic SW locally....

: ( oh well....

 

sorry that's 6x

 

..................

Could be what you got was a demonstration of the drivers' attitude /
aptitude? I'm still, very much, learning Pro/E and have no exposure to
Catia, little exposure to SW to put things in perspective, but I'd venture
an uneducated guess that unless you need automotive body styling surface
quality or heavy duty mfg integration you don't need 30K worth of Catia. I
could also be grossly underestimating your needs, too. Anyway, if you can
make the problems available, sometime in the next few weeks I'd be happy to
give them a learning experience whirl and either throw my hands up in
despair or get back to you. Another thought; if you can go public with the
data sets, posting to McadCentral or another (?) multi - group site might
stir some cross platform interest (I have no idea what their attachment
limits are). Good luck with the endeavor....

 

Neil,

Sorry to be so slow to respond. Things are pretty hectic at work and I
haven't checked on the news group in more than a week.

This was our impression. The subdivided surfaces are, I'm pretty sure, part
of the Imagine and Shape module. The fellow from Catia who showed it to us
was able to approximate our Recon main case, battery and cap shapes in
literally a few minutes. It would, no doubt, take considerably longer to
dial it in really tight, but it took us months in SolidWorks.

Exactly. Which is why we are probably going to make the move. Catia is still
at the top of our list, although we finally got a better web demo of NX3 and
feel that it can also do what we need. The NX3 user interface is better than
NX2, but still seems to require more clicks than Catia to do the same stuff.
If we compare Catia and NX3 systems with similar capability (Catia Hybrid
Design, without Imagine and Shape, Freestyle Sketch Tracer and Functional
Modeling), the prices after haggling are pretty comparable.

We have only had demonstrations and haven't played with the UI ourselves,
but it looks like we could pick it up pretty quickly. The VAR says that the
people coming from SW are the quickest to learn in their training classes.


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Actually, it started out several years ago as a stand alone. Dassault bought
the rights (non-excluxive, since ImpactXoft is selling it by itself) a year
or so ago and now offer it as their Functional Modeling module in Catia. It
also seems to be the technology behind the similar, but apparently more
limited, capability in SW05.

The Functional Modeling module for Catia does seem to be very powerful.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

I don't know what ImpactXoft wants, but the Functional Modeling module for
Catia lists for $4K.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Most definitely, the attitude and aptitude of the driver is a critical
factor in how the demonstration goes. The fellow who first showed us NX2 and
NX3 was a local user who was not familiar with the type of work we do. He
was definitely swimming in too deep water. We finally got a web demo by
someone who did a lot of work like ours and could see what the software
could actually do. The NX3 interface is better than NX2, but it still seems
to require a lot of mouse clicks. It also seems to be organized in a
somewhat confusing manner. Even the second demonstrator spent a fair amount
of time looking for functions in menus, sometimes for functions he said he
used "all the time".

The Pro/E demo was also over the web. PTC didn't appear to put much effort
into it. They've been very slow to respond to us and seem more interested in
making excuses than making good parts.

The Catia people were extremely capable and thoroughly professional.

If we can't get the sales people commited to getting our business, how much
commitment are we going to get after the sale?

It's robustness that we are looking for. SolidWorks just doesn't seem to be
working out well for us. We spend too much time fixing things that break
when we make seemingly unrelated changes. The problems seem to go back to
the quality of the surfaces that we start with. Catia seems to build much
higher quality surfaces.

I'm afraid we can't do that. The problem parts we are using are from
existing and not-yet-released products. Our managers require non-disclosure
agreements before we can give them out. It's also too late. We are going to
be making up our mind this week, or possibly next.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Jerry,
I was wondering if have you looked into Shapeworks in your search for a
better way of doing things?
I recently found an archived partner webcast at SW that was much more
informative about its use than their own website presentation which was
totally uninspiring.
http://www.solidworks.com/pages/partners/Partner_webcast_for_VAR.html
It looked quite useful to me, although not as elastic as subsurfs would be.
I think the price is a bit steep....still its much cheaper than upgrading to
Catia.
guess I am procrastinating... : ) or niggardly...or both!
cheers
neil

 

We did look into ShapeWorks, SurfaceWorks and GeometryWorks. We felt that
ShapeWorks didn't give us the kind of control we needed where surfaces meet
(curvature continuity, typically). As I recall, both SurfaceWorks and
GeometryWorks gave us that kind of control. SurfaceWorks had a rather
difficult user interface and was quite expensive (though much cheaper than
switching to Catia!). GeometryWorks seemed to be the best match to us. We
decided against GeometryWorks because we felt that a lot of our problems
came from downstream operations (shelling, fillets, all of the normal joys
of making a real part from a surface) and it wasn't clear that changing the
way we built the surfaces in SolidWorks would help. Perhaps we were wrong.


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

when I worked at Boeing we were early adopters of Catia V5, I had been
using SW for about 4 years at the time. I was able to use V5 without
any formal training and create several models for use in an animation
our group prepared. I like V5 but it is way to expensive for a home
business. I use SW and find that for my applications it does just fine.
I am not at Boeing anymore so my use of V5 is over........however I
am/was able to buy SW2003 and that is what I am still using and am
quite happy with it.

Cheers,
Brad