Inventor 11 vs. SW 2006

Hi all,

While I have been pushing for lots of comments for improving SW's
drawing environment I do want to say some positive things reguarding
SW's in general.

Before I started using SW I was fairly proficient with Inventor 7. For
some of you that are still wondering which CAD product to purchase some
of these comments may be helpful. And while I had a significant
investment in both dollars and training time IV was so frustrating that
I basically started from scratch by buying SW.

For the last year or so I have been using SW exclusively but a friend
of mine is needing to learn IV, (per his employer) so I have been
helping him. He is using IV 11 and I started out thinking that
Autodesk has probably cleaned up a lot of "issues" between IV7 and
IV11.

As I have been helping my buddy through his first project it is amazing
just how quickly I have forgotten some of the frustrations that IV
created on a daily basis. Over the last week, here are a few of the
things that occured.

1) My buddy did some work and was careful to save it but the next day
when he re-opened the assembly, it was a total disaster. He basically
had to start out from scratch and rebuild the entire assembly. Perhaps
he pushed some button wrong but I rember times when this happened to
me. Never did figure out why this happens sometimes but even as a new
user with SW I don't remember a time when I didn't get back what I had
saved before shutting down the software.

2) During the design process the main plate needed to be lengthened by
3". Seemed simple enough but IV had placed a number of "free"
constraints onto the sketch which took a while to figure out. I have
found that it is much easier to resolve such issues in SW because I
have a hot key that toggles the sketch constraints on and off, (the S
key) so I can see where the conflict is. It also seemed much easier to
edit the constraints in SW then it was in IV. The next problem that
happend after the main plate was 3" longer in IV was that returning to
the assembly there were about 15 errors that were generated in the
constraints. It took a while to wade through them, (about an hour
total to make one part 3" longer). In SW I just have not had the same
number of "random" errors generated with constraints. There are times
when things blow up in SW but this is usually the direct result of some
surface that I have eliminated that was referenced. And in SW these
are fairly easy to correct.

3) The third major disaster, occured today when my buddy opened his
assembly, (with a grand total of about 10 parts). He found that one of
the parts had been duplicated and was floating above the assembly. Of
couse as a new user, these things seem to happen more often. But, to
correct these types of problems all that needed to be done is to delete
the random part in both IV and in SW. However, IV had some other
strange things going on which resulted in us deleting 3 parts that got
unlinked somehow....???? and then about a dozen constraints... what a
mess.... And as a new user he was very careful to save his work.

SW does have it's issues but I have found that the frustration level
for IV is many times more. There were other little things that poped
up with IV but thankfull with SW I have long forgotten about most of
them. I am totally amazed that IV is still so "fragile" in some areas.

Seeing IV again, I am more convinced then ever that the user interface
is much more logical then SW. As an example, one screen poped up,
(while we were looking for something) that had probably every
prompt/message in IV with a way of controlling if it was displayed or
not. There are messages in SW that are just anoying and there is no way
of turning them off. Also, the layout of the tools in IV are much more
intuitive. At times I find myself looking in some of the stranges pull
down places in SW. All of this would give the impression to a
potential new user that IV is much easier to learn the SW. However,
the strange-unexpected-free "features" that apparently IV still pops up
with are extremely hard to deal with. And you usually don't seem these
free features when you are watching a demo.

I noticed that after about 6 months of IV that I was able to avoid
many, (but not all) of the sequences that were prone to creating
problems. But, it took about 9 months to be able to understand and to
effectively respond to the strange error messages that fairly routinely
pop up in IV. Because SW is apparently more inherently stable I felt
that after 3 months of working with/ learning SW that I had surpassed
the effeciency that I had after 9 months with IV.

I hope this helps.

 

You should post this to the Autodesk Inventor newsgroup.

Ken

 

Sounds like your friend needs to get a new teacher. The operations you
describe having trouble with are all but identical in SWX and Inventor.
I can't understand why you had so much trouble.

 

Actually, back when I was using IV, I did mention some of these
things... everyone else were probalby having the same issues.

 

Actually, this is a typical situation where my buddy took a week long
class and now he is back to his office and he has to complete this
project. I agree that everything that he was doing is very basic to SW
and IV. But, I was amazed how unstable that IV still was.

 

I agree that everything that he was doing is very basic to SW

I have been teaching both side-by-side for several years. I would say
the problem as described by you is in the operator's seat. Have him
zip and post an assembly he is having trouble with at
http://www.mcadforums.com so someone can take a look.

 

Thank you for the offer, I will forward it onto him. He had a deadline
and the assembly only had about 10 parts so he just started over, (a
couple of times).

I agree that most of the problems are in the Operator's seat. However,
I found it interesting that IV continues to appear to be much more
"fragile" then SW. I probably have considerably less experinece with
new users then you do but this is the second time I am "seeing IV
through new eyes" and compared to SW it is not a pretty picture.